3. Attention

This is the chapter that explains what CRM City is for. Everything in chapters 1 and 2 is bookkeeping; this is the part that does something you cannot do yourself.

3.1 Relationship health

Every contact carries a health colour. There are three, and unlike every other CRM, they are not a warm-to-cold scale with one bad end.

Green is a target between two errors, not the top of a ladder. That is the whole idea.

Why the second half exists

Neglect is easy to see once someone points at it, and every CRM points at it. Crowding is invisible from the inside, because the person doing it never feels it — only the person receiving it does, and they do not complain, they just go quiet.

The reason no other CRM shows you this is not technical. It is that they are all sold to sales departments, where more contact means more pipeline. Software that tells a salesperson to back off contradicts what its buyer is paying for.

What counts as a touch

Calls, emails, meetings and messages. Notes do not count. A note is something you write about a person, not something they experienced; if notes counted, the most disciplined record-keeper on your team would show up as the biggest nuisance.

Everything counts regardless of where it came from — an email you typed by hand, a campaign send, a sequence step, a booking, anything pushed in from a connected system. This is deliberate: it is the only way the number reflects what your organisation is actually doing to someone, rather than what you personally remember doing. A campaign lands on the same counter as a phone call, because from the other side it is the same thing — you contacted them again.

Telegram messages and logged conversations count too, with two rules worth knowing.

A message they sent you keeps the relationship alive but never makes you red. They contacted you; you did not crowd them. Inbound moves the clock, nothing more.

Group conversations do not count towards crowding. In a one-to-one thread, what you write is aimed at that person. In a group, they joined a shared space, and the traffic there is not directed at them. Otherwise a small-group leader posting daily would turn twelve people red in a week, and the warning would become noise for exactly the people it was built for. Group messages still count as contact for the quiet side: if you are talking in the same room, the relationship is alive.

Red beats blue

If someone has been silent for six months and then receives five things in a fortnight, they are red, not blue. Excess is an error in its own right, no matter how recent the last contact was. In practice this catches the most common failure in the product: you notice a neglected list, you enthusiastically re-engage everyone at once, and you turn neglect into crowding in a single afternoon.

Where you see it

On the dashboard, on contact lists, and on individual records. The dashboard surfaces the people you have neglected longest, oldest first — which is the right order, because the longest silence is the hardest to recover.

3.2 Variety — the second axis

Colour answers how often. It does not answer how same.

A person can sit comfortably in green and still be receiving nothing but broadcasts: the monthly newsletter, the campaign, the sequence step. Correct tempo, identical content. That is still the song you switch off — however well-spaced it is.

So there is a second, independent signal. When someone has had three or more bulk sends in 90 days and nothing personal at all, the contact page says so.

It is deliberately independent of the colour, because you can be green and monotone at the same time, and that combination is the easiest one to miss. The numbers look fine. The relationship is still going flat.

Two windows, on purpose: intensity is judged over two weeks, sameness needs three months. If they matched, the two signals would be saying the same thing in different words.

The warning is not asking you to send more. It is asking for one line written for that person alone, which is worth more than another well-timed broadcast.

3.3 Reminders

A reminder is a dated follow-up attached to a contact. Create one when you promise something, and it appears on your dashboard the day it is due.

Automations can create them too, which is where they become useful at scale: "when a deal is won, remind me in thirty days", "when someone submits feedback below three stars, remind me tomorrow". Chapter 6.

The distinction from a task: a reminder is a nudge to you about a person. A task is a piece of work, possibly assigned to someone else.

3.4 Tasks

Work items with a due date, a status, and an assignee. Unlike reminders, they can be given to another member of your team.

Use reminders for relationships and tasks for work. The line is not enforced by the software and you will blur it; that is fine.

3.5 The calendar

A single monthly view that merges everything with a date on it: bookings, tasks and events. Rather than checking three separate lists to find out what next Tuesday looks like, you look once.

3.6 Birthdays

If a contact has a date of birth, the product runs a daily check at 07:00 and creates a task for the owner on the day. It also emits a contact.birthday event, which means an automation can act on it — send the greeting, add a tag, whatever you decide.

Birthdays are a native field on the contact, not a custom field. If you are migrating from an older setup where it was custom, it has been moved for you.

3.7 Focus mode

A lens over the entire dashboard. Set it to a group, a company or a tag, and every widget — reminders, neglected contacts, the lot — narrows to that slice.

The use case is having one CRM that behaves like several. A pastor with six small groups focuses on one and sees only those members. A consultant focuses on one client account. Nothing is hidden permanently and nothing is duplicated; you are looking through a lens and you can take it off.

Focus is remembered between sessions, which is worth knowing when the dashboard looks emptier than you expected. Check the focus selector before concluding something is broken.

3.8 How to actually use this

The honest workflow, once your people are in:

Look at the dashboard first thing. It tells you who has gone quiet and what is due. That is the whole ritual; it takes a minute.

Deal with the longest silence, not the whole list. The list is ordered oldest-first for a reason. Two people properly re-engaged beats thirty generic messages, and the thirty generic messages will turn a chunk of your list red.

Log the offline stuff. The phone call, the corridor conversation, the coffee. If it does not get logged, the product will keep telling you that you are neglecting someone you spoke to yesterday, and you will stop trusting it — which is the real failure mode.

Watch for red. Red is not a badge of effort. It means someone is being crowded and is probably about to stop replying. The correct response to red is to stop, not to try harder.

What to read next

You now know what the product is for. The remaining chapters are modules — switch on what your work needs and ignore the rest.

Chapter 5 (Email) is the natural next one if you send anything at all, because it is where most of your activity log will come from without you typing it.