To the frequent dismay of my friends and family, I tend to approach tasks with a moderately unhealthy single mindedness and have an obsessive focus on planning and analysis. I’ve decided to turn this focus to my social life and I’ll thus spend the next 2-3 months improving my social skills, expanding my network and tracking the results.

My social life has changed over the past few years. When I was at university, it was a lot more free flowing. I was in a place with a lot of people doing the same thing and with a lot of free time on their hands. I’m not a part of that community anymore, and my social life has declined in proportion. It’s also become more homogenous, as I’ve stopped having the spontaneous encounters with the people I’m not immediately comfortable with.

Something else that’s changed is that the people I used to know in my network were edge nodes that connected me to another network, essentially doing the work of maintaining that network for me, meaning I could go along to the parties and social events of that network without really being a part of it. Of course having this single link means low resiliency, so when my relationship declines with that individual node my connection to that network effectively ceases as well.

So now I’d like to actively change this. I want to live a more socially interesting life, to have a larger network and to make that network denser (each person-node has many connections to other nodes) for greater resiliency. I’d also like to meet more women. To do this I’m going to totally fill my free time with social activity and its analysis. I’m going to take every opportunity I can and create as many as possible. I’ll make an effort to meet new people and work out what parameters help me to develop rapport and what leads to the growth of a friendship.

Here’s a more complete list:

• Know more people
  • Make an effort to increase the rank of existing of contacts in network, including old friends who have slipped
    • Send texts and emails to these people
    • Invite these people to events I’m going to and to meet individually
  • Make an effort to turn new acquaintances into increasingly ranked contacts in network
    • Take notes on interactions with new people and work out what’s blocking progression, make effort to be actively social when meeting new people
    • Send texts and emails to these people
    • Invite these people to events I’m going to and to meet individually
  • Invite friends to events where they can get to know each other to increase connectedness of network and establish core
  • Setup social media accounts
    • Setup facebook + add friends
    • Setup twitter
    • Hire a freelancer to manage my facebook and twitter accounts - post updates and send digests of relevant information
• Go out more
  • Accept all invitations to social events from people I already know
  • Instigate events and invite people to attend, esp people I don’t know well
  • Find and attend meetup and similar events where interesting people might be
  • Start drinking
    • Establish set of rules to prevent excessive drinking
    • Plan party to celebrate first beer, prepare flyer and guest list
• Go on more dates
  • Meet women in person (through knowing more people), ask them on dates
  • Set up profiles + send messages on online dating services
    • Take photos for profile
    • OkCupid
      • Set up bot for auto liking/profile viewing etc
    • Tinder
      • Set up bot to auto like users, make date requests
    • Happn
    • Others (there seem to be hundreds)

Next post: Tracking improvement