The monthly sphere audit
Twenty minutes once a month to catch spheres that went quiet, fix unrealistic cadences, and re-home anyone adrift.
Once a month, step back from individual contacts and look at your spheres as a whole: which ones quietly went stale, and who's slipped out of any of them entirely.
Why it matters
Spheres are the whole organizing system. If a cadence is unrealistic, or nobody's actually acting on the suggestions it generates, everything downstream, the radar, the dashboard, your morning check-in, goes quiet with it. Nothing throws an error to tell you.
The human version: you catch a sphere that stopped mattering before a year passes, instead of realizing one day that you haven't touched Close Friends since spring.
How it works
Once a month, about twenty minutes, ideally anchored to something that already happens: the first Monday, the day after a team meeting, whatever sticks. You're not reviewing individual people here. You're reviewing the buckets they live in.
How to do it
- Open Relationship Radar and check the Unmonitored section: people who aren't in any active sphere. Decide who belongs somewhere and add them.
- Open each of your spheres and ask whether anyone's actually been reached out to there in the last cadence period. A sphere on a quarterly cadence with zero suggestions acted on in three months is quietly dead.
- For any sphere where the cadence feels wrong, too aggressive and you're ignoring every suggestion, or too loose and people fall through, adjust it. A cadence you ignore is worse than no cadence at all.
- Filter for people whose sphere no longer fits, an old coworker who's now just a friend, someone who moved from prospective client to actual client, then select them and add or remove spheres in bulk instead of one at a time.
- Ask the harder question once: is there a sphere here that should just be archived, because it stopped representing anything real?
What good looks like
- Every active sphere has at least one person you've actually reached out to this month.
- Cadences match how you really operate, not how you wish you operated.
- Nobody important is sitting in Unmonitored by accident.
If you fell off
Skipping this for a few months doesn't cost you anything a twenty-minute pass can't catch up on. Spheres don't expire, they just stop nudging you. That's the whole failure mode: silence, not damage.
Restart with step one alone. Open the radar, check who's unmonitored, fix that. The cadence cleanup can wait for next month.