You will be able to keep in touch with contacts through a short, regular routine.
Find one person who gave you career advice in a conversation and check the date of the last message you sent them. If the last thing they heard from you was the goodbye at the end of the call, the steps below will help you pick the contact up again and keep others from going quiet.
Suppose, as an invented example, you spoke with someone working in the field you are aiming for. They gave you thirty minutes, some useful advice and two names to contact. You said thanks before hanging up, and then your week filled up. Three months later you have a question for them. The last they heard from you was a goodbye on a video call, so writing now feels as if you only get in touch when you need something.
Most networks fade through months of silence that nobody intended, and very few end with a falling-out. A routine for keeping contacts warm works if it is small enough that it never becomes a chore for you, and occasional enough that it never becomes a nuisance for the person on the other end.
Send a thank-you note within a day of the conversation. Many people know they should send one and never do, so sending it already sets you apart.
What you put in the note matters more than the speed. A line like "Thanks for your time, it was great chatting" is polite, and the person will forget it within the week. Pick one specific piece of advice they gave you and say how you plan to act on it. This shows you were listening and that their time made a difference to you. End with a promise to tell them how it goes, which gives you a natural reason to write again later.
Wei Ling was changing careers and had an informational conversation with an analyst at a retailer. The analyst told her that data cleaning is most of the job. The day after the chat, Wei Ling sent a thank-you note that quoted that point back. She said she would build her SQL portfolio project around a messy public dataset instead of a clean one, to practise the part of the work that matters, and promised to report back. That last line gave her a natural reason to write again.
A few weeks later, follow up and tell them what you actually did with their advice and what came of it. Most people never send this message, and it is the one that turns a single conversation into a relationship.
People who give advice rarely find out whether it helped. Telling them is a small gift. It shows their time was well spent, and it gives them a reason to keep an eye out for you.
About a month after her thank-you note, Wei Ling sent her update. She had finished the SQL project using public data on bus arrival times, and most of the work had been cleaning the data, as the analyst had predicted. She said the project was posted on her LinkedIn, offered to share it and thanked the analyst again. The analyst replied within an hour, asked to see the project and mentioned a role opening up in the analyst's team.
A result like that is not guaranteed, and it is not the reason to write. It does happen far more often to people who follow up than to people who stay quiet.
Between conversations, look for small, natural reasons to be in touch that are about the other person and their work. Lesson 7.1, You already have a network, made the point that a network grows by being useful to the people in it, and sharing things is where you put that into practice. You can:
pass on an article or report that fits their work, with a line on why you thought of them introduce them to someone they would benefit from knowing, after checking with both people first congratulate them on a new role, promotion or work anniversary when LinkedIn notifies you leave a thoughtful comment on something they post
Each of these takes about a minute and keeps you in mind as someone who adds something.
Keep sharing occasional. For most contacts, once every few months per person is plenty. Messages that come more often than that, especially a link with no comment, make it look as if you are working through a list. You are working through a list, but the person receiving the message should not feel it.
The main reason people let contacts fade is that they forget, even when they mean well. A simple list fixes the forgetting. Set up a sheet with six columns: name, how you know them, their field or company, date of last contact, what you talked about, and next contact date.
Start it short. Add the most relevant people from your network map in Lesson 7.1, the ones closest to the direction you are heading, plus everyone you have had an informational conversation with. Then set a phone reminder for each next contact date.
When a reminder comes up, look for a real reason to write: an update on your plans, a question only this person can answer, or something worth passing on. If no real reason comes to mind, push the reminder back a few weeks instead of sending something empty.
Arjun keeps his list in a spreadsheet of about twenty-five people. Every Sunday evening he spends ten minutes checking who is due, and he usually sends two or three short messages. It takes less time than scrolling a social media feed, and over a year every person on the list hears from him a few times.
Ten minutes a week is enough for most people. The routine needs to be light enough to survive a busy month, so if it starts to feel like a burden, shorten the list to the people who matter most for your next move.
In the activity, set up your contact list with a last-contact date for each person, and put three follow-ups in your calendar for the coming month.
Make a contact list with the date you last spoke to each person, and schedule three follow-ups for the next month.
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