Stop losing relationships to ADHD time blindness — track reach-outs, responses, and your social battery so the people you care about stay in the picture.
There is a text in your phone you have been meaning to answer for nine days. A friend you genuinely love crosses your mind, and you realize it has been three months. You feel the guilt about not calling your mom back, and then you blink and it is a year later. ADHD rarely wrecks relationships through conflict. It does it through disappearing — quietly, accidentally, while you fully intended to stay in touch. The ADHD Relationship and Social Tracker is built for exactly this pattern: not to make you a better communicator by willpower, but to give you a system that keeps the people you care about visible before they fade out entirely.
The dashboard tracks your Reach-Outs, your response rate (Messages returned), your Social Energy level, and your Connection Score. Log your interactions and the tool builds a Contact Log, a pattern of your social energy across the week, and a Commitments list for things you said you would do and need to follow through on.
Time blindness and the vanishing friend problem
For ADHD brains, time does not flow in a continuous stream the way it seems to for neurotypical people. It splits into two zones: right now, and not right now. A friend you have not talked to in a month is not necessarily a friend you have lost interest in — they are just currently in the not-right-now zone, which might as well be infinite from your brain's perspective.
The tracker pulls people back into view by creating a visible log of who you last reached out to and when. It does not replace genuine relationship effort. It replaces the mechanism your brain is missing — the automatic low-level awareness of how much time has passed since you connected with someone. Once you can see that you have not reached out to someone in six weeks, the actual reaching out is often easy. The problem was never caring. The problem was not noticing.
Social Energy: why tracking your battery changes how you spend it
The Social Energy field tracks your current social battery level — how much capacity you have for social interaction right now. For many ADHD adults, this fluctuates dramatically and is often invisible until it is empty. You say yes to social plans when you are at 80% and cancel when you arrive at 20%. You schedule calls on paper and then cannot make yourself pick up the phone.
Tracking social energy daily does something specific: it shows you the distribution of your battery across the week. Most people see predictable patterns — high energy mid-week, low energy on Sundays and Mondays, variable based on sleep and stress. Once you can see your typical pattern, you can schedule reach-outs and social commitments during windows when your battery is reliably higher, and protect lower-energy periods from obligations you will not be able to meet.
The Patterns tab shows your Social Energy trend over time. A consistently declining trend over two or three weeks is worth paying attention to — it often signals burnout building rather than introversion.
Commitments: the promise-tracking problem ADHD creates
ADHD adults often make commitments in the moment of high social energy and forget them the moment the conversation ends. Not because they are unreliable people, but because working memory does not retain things it has no hook to hold onto. A commitment made verbally during a phone call goes into the same mental space as every other thing you are thinking about — and most of them fall out.
The Commitments tracker in the dashboard is specifically for this: things you said you would do, people you said you would message back, invitations you said yes to. Logging them at the time creates the hook that working memory cannot provide on its own. The social cost of un-kept commitments in ADHD relationships is significant — it generates a reputation for unreliability that does not reflect intention. The tracker is the infrastructure that closes that gap.
Connection Score: what a functioning social system looks like in numbers
The Connection Score synthesizes your Reach-Out frequency, Response Rate, Social Energy trend, and logging consistency into a single number. A score above 65 means your social system is active and functioning — you are reaching out, following through on responses, and managing your social energy without consistent depletion. A score below 40 usually means one of three things: social withdrawal is happening, commitments are going untracked, or the response rate is very low (which might mean the reach-outs are not landing the way you intend).
The Connection Score is also useful for the reverse of the typical ADHD social problem: people who over-extend their social commitments and then crash. A score that is high but accompanied by very low Social Energy readings is a signal that social depletion is happening — you are maintaining the metrics but it is costing you more than it should.
Contact Log: making important people permanently visible
The Contact Log holds your record of interactions — who you reached out to, how, when, and whether they responded. Over time it becomes a practical relationship maintenance tool. You can see at a glance who you have not talked to in a while, which relationships have a healthy back-and-forth pattern, and which ones are consistently one-directional.
Many ADHD adults also use the Contact Log to track relationships that matter a lot but live outside their daily visibility — family members they rarely see, mentors they want to stay connected to, friends in different time zones. Log the relationship, set a rough cadence in your head, and the Contact Log becomes the memory system your brain was not given. No formulas, no social graph algorithms — just your people, visible and accounted for. Start a free trial to keep your Contact Log and Connection Score history across sessions, so the people you care about stop disappearing when you close the tab.
How to use it
- Log your Reach-Outs for the day: any intentional contact with someone in your network, however brief.
- Rate your Social Energy level for the day — your current battery level for social interaction from low to high.
- Record any commitments you made during social interactions in the Commitments tracker before you close the tab.
- Log your Response Rate: the percentage of messages you received that you actually replied to this week.
- Review the Contact Log weekly to identify who has been in the not-right-now zone too long and needs a reach-out.
Who it's for
- Freelancer who has lost three close friends to ADHD disappearing — Adds 8 important relationships to the Contact Log and sets a rough mental cadence for each. After four weeks of logging, averages 5 reach-outs per week versus the previous estimate of 1. Connection Score climbs from 31 to 58.
- Remote worker who over-commits to video calls and cancels them — Tracks Social Energy for three weeks and discovers their battery is reliably low on Mondays and Tuesdays. Stops scheduling calls on those days. Cancellation rate drops to near zero within a month.
- ADHD adult managing a family network with aging parents — Uses the Commitments tracker to log every call-me-back and I'll-send-you-that promise made during family calls. Response Rate climbs from 40% to 81% over six weeks, and family relationships feel noticeably less strained.
- Creator building a professional network intentionally — Uses the Reach-Out tracker to hold a minimum of 3 professional reach-outs per week — a cold outreach, a reply to a comment, or a DM to someone they respect. Connection Score reaches 72 after two months and two collaborations materialize from the network.
Key terms
- Social battery
- The available energy for social interaction at a given moment. Tracked here as Social Energy — a daily rating that varies with sleep, stress, stimulation load, and accumulated social demands.
- Reach-out
- An intentional, self-initiated contact with someone in your network. Distinct from reactive replies, which count toward Response Rate. The core behavior the tracker is designed to support.
- Connection Score
- A composite score reflecting reach-out frequency, response rate, social energy trend, and commitment follow-through. Measures the health of your relationship maintenance system.
- Time blindness
- The ADHD-related difficulty perceiving how much time has passed, which causes relationships to go unattended for months without the person realizing it. The Contact Log is the external memory system that compensates for it.
Frequently asked questions
What counts as a reach-out for logging purposes?
Any intentional contact: a DM, a text, a comment on someone's post you meant specifically for them, a voice memo, an email. Reactive replies to messages others sent do not count as reach-outs — they count toward your Response Rate. The distinction matters because reach-outs are about initiation, which is the harder behavior for ADHD brains.
My Social Energy is consistently low. Does the tool help with that?
It helps you understand the pattern behind it, which is the first step. Consistently low Social Energy in the data usually correlates with one or more of: disrupted sleep, high-stimulation work days, insufficient alone time, or an overscheduled social calendar. The Patterns tab will show you the correlations in your own data. What you do with that information may involve changes beyond what a tracking tool can provide.
How do I use this tool without it feeling like a social obligation checklist?
Focus on the Reach-Outs and Social Energy fields first, not the Commitments or Response Rate. The reach-out habit — one or two intentional contacts per day — is the core behavior. The other metrics exist to show you whether it is working and what is getting in the way. If it starts feeling like performance, scale back the logging to the two fields that matter most.
Can I use this tool for professional networking as well as personal relationships?
Yes — the Contact Log and Reach-Out fields work equally well for professional contacts. Many users split their categories between personal and professional and track them in the same dashboard. The Social Energy and Connection Score apply regardless of whether the relationships are personal or professional.