Too Busy to Stay Connected to Friends & Family? Remember the Five-Minute Rule

For almost all of us at this point and in this economic climate, staying in touch with our friends and family seems next to impossible. It's not that we don't love them or care. We do. No doubt about it. I don't think anyone -- no matter famous or unfamous, or how busy, callous, cynical or even jaded -- would claim that staying connected to their good friends and family is not important to them. But let's face it: it feels hard right now. Difficult. Challenging. Facebook seems to help. Twitter seems to help. Texting for sure. Emails not so much. As stated a few weeks (or perhaps even months) ago here, email has become that "best friend we just loved so much we invited to sleep over and now they won't leave." Necessary for work. But by the time we're done with how much email we need to read, address and reply to for "work related issues," the last thing we want to do when we get home is sit down and do more email for friends or family related issues. Especially if it's "just to say hello." Unless someone is just absolutely rich as hell and wealthy to no end and therefore never needs to use email for "work," email now is just as challenging to keep up with as anything else in our lives. Think laundry, dry cleaning, making dinner for the family or mowing the lawn for that matter. What was once a fun novelty has now turned into a verifiably challenging and time consuming chore or task.

Me? I'm still feeling the "texting thing" is the most private, personal, efficient and fastest way to shoot out some love to my friends and family.. But I've got plenty of friends and colleagues who feel the same way about texting as I do about email. One friend of mine, The King, absolutely refuses to text me back. He likes to "book appointments to have conversations." He says he finds texting too much work when he's spent all day "talking" for work. That just makes no sense to me. But it's his world, his life. If I'm going to stay friends with him forever I'm just going to have to abide by his contradictory illogical logic. But I'm still hoping that one day he'll wake up and realize that daily texting is a hell of a lot more personally fulfilling in friendship than nothing at all.... Because honestly, I just don't have the ability to guarantee that I'll be able to have a conversation at "8:45 PM" when he wants to make these appointments. Furthermore, making an appointment to speak with a friend, as opposed to just keeping it open, feels too much like work to me.

So what DO we do to stay connected to those we love most? Besides flying into town and showing up for an annual holiday, birth, graduation or death in the family... all very rational and reliable ways to assure that we will see our loved ones at least once a year. But again, who wants to grow up only to realize that we're only going to see our friends and/or family once a year? That's not staying connected. That's fulfilling our duty. What about the rest of the year? Read on...


Solution? The Five-Minute Rule. The foundation of the Five-Minute Rule came from a brainstorming session I held over a period of weeks with several hundred friends attempting to discern WHY we don't stay better connected to our friends and family more often. The conclusion was "if we don't communicate with someone for a long period of time, we tend to assume that when we finally DO re-connect with them that we're going to feel obligated to play a lot of catch up and that the call is going to take a long time. Being as busy as we all feel we are, no one feels that they can spare the time. So we put it off. With the best intentions, we still just tend to put off calling so and so...." It's a fear based action, or non-action as the case may be.

After many people expressed the same final conclusion as their "primary reason for putting off staying in touch with others", I realized that I tend to agree with this conclusion. I too suffer from this same fear, and therefore do the same thing: procrastinate calling someone I just KNOW I should be calling. And that's the thing: we are all prone to it and we are all perfectly justified in feeling this way. We ARE busier than we've ever been. And time really does feel like it's speeding up. Scientists tell us that it isn't in our imaginations; that time really is "speeding up." For all of us on planet earth at least. If you've got friends who don't live on planet earth, or perhaps not even in the Milky Way galaxy, perhaps you're world looks and feels a bit different than the rest of ours. Hats off to ya. But for the rest of us, Mission Control, we've got a problem.

So what to do? Well, it's actually quite simple: let go of the belief that "if I reach out and call so and so, it's going to take forever to catch up and I just simply do not have the time for that right now.... I'll call them when I get a little less swamped." Problem there is that none of us can truly predict or guarantee that we're ever going to get "a little less swamped." Who knows? Maybe this is it. Maybe this is what "being an adult" looks like. G2 and I have tried everything. We used to work in the same building. One of my most successful companies, he downstairs and me upstairs. We KNEW we were going to see each other almost every day. But then he moved to Chile. Since that move, our communications have become less and less frequent. And we've tried everything! Facebook, Skype, Viber, Twitter, Echofon, emails, texting to email addresses and vice versa. Nothing seemed to work. Though Twitter seems to be helping the most.

So imagine my surprise the other day when out of the blue he just called. There he was. His name blinking on my iPhone like a five alarm fire. Normally I don't pick the phone up because I'm either already on the phone with someone else, or about to be; or out; or in a meeting; or about to enter a meeting. I have so many friends now who actually become annoyed if I DO pick up the phone. "Oh man, dude, I didn't think you were going to pick up. That's why I called. I just wanted to say hello." Funny but true. "Ok....? Should I hang up so you can call back and leave a message?" Sometimes that really is the best answer. Though sometimes it's not. The reality is this, if everyone just remembers and agrees to adopt the Five-Minute Rule, we don't have a problem.

My wife is by far the person I know personally who practices this rule the best out of anyone we know. In fact she just came home and told me that her brother says "hi." I'm like "Did you talk to him?" "Yes." "How long did you two speak?" I asked.  "About ten minutes, maybe less." "See! The Five-Minute Rule works doesn't it?!" To which she replied, "You mean that idea that we talk more frequently but keep it short?" "Yeah... I was just writing about it in the Diaries..."

And in short, that's basically it. Simple and effective. Talk more frequently but keep it short. Don't be afraid that the conversation is going to last forever. It won't if you don't allow it to. Say hello, how are you, I'm this or that, how are your kids/parents/spouse/girlfriend/boyfriend/job/hobby/etc.? And that's that. Five to ten minutes is plenty. Especially if you plan to speak again in a few days or a few weeks. If you practice the second half of the rule, i.e. "keep it short", chances are you WILL actually speak again sooner than later. And we all want that. No life is worth much without regularly connecting with all the friends and family we've worked so hard at bonding with through the years. No matter how much money we are making or how little; and no matter busy we are.

Five minutes. That's all it takes. Pick up that phone. Dial the number and have a chat. Keep it short. You'll be surprised how fulfilling real live talking with someone who loves you can be. I find that it makes a big difference in how I feel each day. Of course I'm still not very good at the Five-Minute Rule. Mainly because I haven't mastered the first part, "Pick up the phone and call more frequently." But I'm working on it. If you've one of the many friends or family members that I'm blessed to call my own, cut me some slack. I promise you I'm sincerely working on this.