At Your Best: How to Get Time, Energy, and Priorities Working in Your Favor

by Carey Nieuwhof

Decide how quickly you’ll respond to and how often you’ll reach out to your best friends, friends, and tribe. The principle is simple: stop treating everyone the same, because all relationships aren’t the same. The depth of the relationship should determine the depth and speed of your response. I respond to my family pretty much immediately, and my phone is programmed to let them ring through no matter where I am or what I’m doing. I also happen to have one wife and two kids, so it’s a pretty tiny circle. And my family doesn’t ping me every thirty seconds, so that works just fine. But on to friends. I’ll get back to my three to five within the hour, unless I’m in the middle of really deep work in my Green Zone. I usually get back to my twelve to fifteen within a few hours and always within the same day. My tribe? Probably same day or within forty-eight hours, depending on how they’re trying to reach me. Everyone else? Those are people I or my team will get back to within a few days or sometimes not at all. You simply place these people on a task list and get back to them in your normal workflow down the road. The depth of your response should be gauged by the depth of the relationship. Unless you really want to connect deeply with that person you met at the conference last summer in San Diego, you really don’t need to drop what you’re doing to compose a long, thoughtful response.

“The depth of your response should be gauged by the depth of the relationship.”