Getting Started
Connect is designed to get you from zero to organized quickly. Follow these seven steps to set up your relationship management workflow.
Step 1: Create Tags and Lists
Before importing contacts, set up your organization system.
Tags are broad categories with colors — think of them as labels you’d stick on a contact:
- Close Friend, Investor, Board Member, Client, Mentor
- Start with 3-5 tags. You can always add more during Contact Sweep.
Lists are curated groups with icons — think of them as specific rosters:
- Board of Directors, Holiday Card List, 2025 Prospects
Set cadences on each tag and list — this is key. A cadence tells Connect how often you want to reach out to people in that group. For example:
- Close Friends: every 30 days
- Clients: every 14 days
- Board Members: every 60 days
Connect uses these cadences to calculate who’s overdue and surface them in Follow Up.
Step 2: Sync Your Contacts
Bring your contacts together from wherever they live:
Apple Contacts — Open the Sync window (⌘⇧I), select Apple Contacts, and import. Connect will ask for Contacts permission and deduplicate by email and name similarity. Review matches before confirming.
Google Contacts — In the Sync window, select Google Contacts and sign in with OAuth. Same smart deduplication applies.
LinkedIn — Export your data from LinkedIn (Settings → Data Privacy → Get a copy of your data → select Connections). Download the ZIP file, then use LinkedIn Archive Import (⌘⇧K) in Connect to import your connections and direct messages.
Connect tracks what’s been synced from each source, so you can re-sync later without creating duplicates.
Step 3: Clean Up with Contact Sweep
Now that your contacts are imported, it’s time to organize them. Open Contact Sweep (⌘⇧G) and review your contacts one at a time.
For each contact:
- Verify the name and basic info
- Assign relevant tags (e.g., “Close Friend”, “Client”)
- Add to lists (e.g., “Holiday Card”, “Board”)
- Add notes or set a “Connect Again” date if needed
- Move to the next contact
Target 1-2 seconds per contact. You’re not writing essays — just quick categorization. A database of 500 contacts takes about 15-20 minutes to sweep.
Strategy: Sort by “Never Contacted” first to prioritize contacts that need the most attention.
Step 4: Check Follow Up
Once your contacts have tags with cadences, the Follow Up view shows you who needs outreach.
Contacts are sorted by how overdue they are. Someone tagged “Close Friend” (30-day cadence) who you last spoke with 60 days ago will rank higher than someone tagged “Client” (14-day cadence) who you spoke with 20 days ago.
Key tools in Follow Up:
- Connect Again dates — Set one-off reminders for specific contacts. Use these after conferences, meetings, or when someone mentions something you want to follow up on.
- Snooze (⌘K) — Temporarily hide contacts when the timing isn’t right. They’ll reappear later.
- Contact Prompter (⌘⇧P) — Enter focused outreach mode. Step through overdue contacts with quick-action buttons for calling, emailing, and texting.
Step 5: Import Your Message History
Connect can pull in your existing conversations to populate the interaction timeline retroactively.
Messages.app (⌘⇧M) — Scans your local Messages database and creates interaction records from your text conversations, matched by phone number with correct dates.
Note: This requires Full Disk Access. Go to System Settings → Privacy & Security → Full Disk Access and enable it for Connect.
Call History (⌘⇧H) — Imports voice calls and FaceTime calls from your macOS call history.
For interactions Connect can’t import automatically — emails, in-person meetings, Signal messages — log them manually on each contact’s detail page. Over time, the timeline fills in naturally as you log new interactions.
Step 6: Use the Dashboard
Open the Dashboard (⌘⇧D) to see how you’re doing.
Contact Freshness — A pie chart showing your contacts by recency of last interaction:
- Green: less than 1 month
- Yellow: 1-3 months
- Orange: 3-12 months
- Red: more than 12 months
- Gray: never contacted
Your goal is to shrink the red and gray slices over time.
Weekly Interactions — A bar chart showing your outreach volume by week, color-coded by interaction type. Watch for trends — are you reaching out more or less than last month?
Activity Lanes — Your most active contacts at a glance.
Filter the dashboard by tag, list, date range, or interaction type to focus on specific areas.
Step 7: Set Up Profiles (Optional)
If you want to keep different areas of your life separate, create Profiles (⌘⇧0).
Each profile is a completely independent database — separate contacts, interactions, tags, lists, and sync history. Common setups:
- Work + Personal
- Professional + Board + Personal
Backup tip: Use Export (⌘⇧E) to create SQLite backups of your profiles before major operations like bulk imports or merges.
Tips for Success
- Be consistent. Check Follow Up daily or weekly. Even 5 minutes of outreach builds strong habits.
- Log interactions as they happen. After a call or meeting, take 10 seconds to log it. The timeline is only as good as the data.
- Use Contact Sweep periodically. When you import new contacts or after a conference, do a quick sweep to categorize.
- Let the Dashboard motivate you. Watch your freshness chart improve as you reach out to neglected contacts.
- Start small. You don’t need to organize everything on day one. Tag the people who matter most first.