How to Reduce Complexity In Your Life Using A Friend Audit

Apparently life is getting more complex for us all. Whether it is or not, or it just feels like it because we have access to way more information than we ever have before, I’ll leave to your better judgement. As always, it’s feelings that matter. Feelings influence your thoughts, which influence your behaviour. Feelings of complexity can make you feel stressed, trapped and generally give you a right royal headf*ck.

A couple of years ago, I had a bout of this. I felt that a lot of decisions were being made for me by the sheer complexity involved in living everyday life. I thought other people may be going through a similar experience, so I thought I would share one (controversial) method that seemed to help me.

The Friend Audit

“You are the average of the 5 people you spend the most time with“. You've probably read or heard that somewhere before. Considering you can’t choose your family (let’s not even go there) one big win you can cover off relatively easily is a simple Friend Audit and get rid of some of the dead wood.

Now before you go running off in the opposite direction, hear me out.

This may seem counterproductive at first. We’re conditioned from a young age that having friends is a desirable thing. Humans are a social species, and as such having a big social circle – especially in today’s huge world of social obsession - can only be a good thing right? Wrong.

It’s a little bit like that old PR adage: ‘there’s no such thing as bad publicity’. That person has obviously never worked in a business where an employee brought a gun into work, which actually happened to me once.

Tech is moving fast, but at the moment we have a finite amount of time to live our lives. We should make the most of our time on this earth with friendships that are worth something, where there’s a shared sense of value and enjoyment.

Each relationship you hold requires an input of your time and effort. With not enough waking hours in the day you can’t do it all and keep your life in a healthy balance, so what gives? For me, it’s the friendships that consistently demand of you in all the wrong ways. Those friendships where your sense of values have drifted so far apart you struggle to have a single conversation. Low value friendships.

It’s incredible how obligated we feel to people who were born at a similar time to us, those who we were forced to share a classroom with for a few years, or those whose parents happened to have lived next to your parents. Because we’ve known people for a long time, we feel obligated. Or because they’ve had a hard time in the past (join the queue).

When our lives are full, we have no time for anything new. That also applies to friends. If your social calendar is full to brim with people who do nothing but moan about the same job they’ve had for 10 years, but refuse to leave. Or those complaining about the marriage that’s on the rocks, but they haven’t ended despite your continued efforts over a number of years to intervene and help. The show must go on. You can free up time by committing none of your time to these people. This frees you up to build out friends that share your values, interests, ambitions and other things that are reflective of where you are NOW and where you’re going – not where you were 15 years ago. High value friendships.

Having friendships that contain resentment or obligation isn’t fair on anyone. And it’s best canned in my experience. Friendships shouldn’t be all sweetness and light by the way, but they should be consistently positive and unnecessarily complex.

My life became a lot easier when I fully audited my friends. I then spent the time on high quality friendships and we stand together during the good times and the bad as friends do. It’s worth reinforcing, this is not about shying away from your real responsibilities as a friend. It helps make sure that you have time for the people that matter. Friendships should be mutually beneficial in some way!

How do you do it?

It doesn’t need to be anything formal. You may have already figured it out as you’ve been reading. However, if you’re one of those people in life who likes a bit more structure – here’s something that could work for you:

1)     Make a list along the top of a piece of paper of the most important things to you. This obviously drives the kinds of people you want to surround yourself with. People who are adventurous, challenging, who share the same interests, independent – whatever you’re looking for depending on your personality.

2)     Make a list down the left hand side of your friends' names and start ticking boxes next to each of the things written down in Stage 1. This might seem odd at first, but once you’ve done this step, you’ll probably find that it brings a a lot more clarity to the situation.

3)     The ones with the least ticks delete from your contacts.

4)     If they get in touch with you after that you can make a judgement call. If it’s support they need, do you want to give it? If you give it, how much are you likely to have to give? Only you can be the judge of whether that’s a good investment of your time. I guess it may depend what else you’ve got going on at that particular time and your other commitments (e.g. family, career, health etc).

I’m sure some people won’t be able to get their head around this one. It certainly worked for me and all I’d say is you’ve got nothing to lose by at least having a crack at Stage 1 and 2 above. You might then find that Stage 3 becomes a more palatable prospect.

Further listening – the Art of Charm podcast