Personal CRM

Personal CRM for Obsidian

A personal relationship manager that answers one question: who should I reach out to?

It works from a premise about how people already use Obsidian. If you keep dated notes — daily notes, a journal, one note per meeting — and you mention people in them with [[wikilinks]], you already have a complete interaction log. It just isn't being read as one. This plugin reads it.

So contact history needs no data entry. Write your notes as usual and the plugin knows when you last saw someone. The only thing you tell it is how often you want to be in touch with each person.

How it works

Daily/2026-08-14.md                     People/Sam Rivera.md
  …coffee with [[Sam Rivera]]…      →     prm-tier: close   (every 30 days)
            │                                      │
            └────── last contact: 2026-08-14 ──────┘
                              │
                    due 2026-09-13 → overdue after that

Dates come from each note's filename, using the same moment.js format that Daily Notes and Periodic Notes use — including folder-nesting patterns like YYYY/MM/YYYY-MM-DD. A note whose filename has no date can be dated by a frontmatter field instead, which is what makes note-per-meeting workflows work.

Links resolve through Obsidian's own metadata cache, so aliases work automatically. Indexing never reads a file from disk, which keeps a full rebuild in the low milliseconds.

What counts as contact

An ordinary [[link]] in a dated note. Deliberately not counted:

• links inside unchecked to-dos — writing “- [ ] reach out to [[Sam]]” must not mark Sam as contacted and silence the reminder that prompted it
• links inside quotes and code blocks
• embeds (![[Sam Rivera]]), so a template or a dashboard that transcludes a person doesn't register as contact

A completed task (- [x] called Sam) does count.

Setup

Enable the plugin. Nothing is guessed: no folder names are assumed. On first run it reads your Daily Notes or Periodic Notes configuration for the dated folder and its format, and looks for a folder named People, Contacts, Friends or similar. If it finds nothing, the Status block says so and Detect folders from your vault will try again at any time.

Check what it found in settings — the Status box at the top shows real counts and refreshes itself as the index changes:

43 people found · 1,204 notes in your dated folders, 1,204 with a readable date · 2,310 interactions derived · indexed in 3ms

If a number there is zero, that's the thing to fix. An empty dashboard always explains itself rather than implying you have nobody to contact.

Then classify people. Only people with a tier get tracked, so nothing nags you until you opt them in. Run Triage unclassified people: it walks through people one at a time, most-mentioned first, showing each note for context. Press 1–5 to assign a tier, p to never track them, space to skip.

Where people come from

Any combination of:

Tags and frontmatter markers find people anywhere in the vault, so a vault organised by area rather than by type works fine. Notes titled as templates, MOCs, indexes or Untitled are excluded, matched as whole words so a real surname like Mochizuki isn't mistaken for a MOC. Notes with unrendered {{placeholders}} are skipped too.

Adding people

Add person in the dashboard header — or Add a person… from the command palette — makes a note in the folder you nominate, optionally from a template, and asks for the tier in the same step so the person is tracked immediately rather than sitting unclassified. Three settings under Creating new people control it:

Templates support {{title}}, {{date}}, {{time}} (and {{date:FORMAT}}), plus any imported field as {{email}}, {{phone}}, {{company}} and so on. Templater's tp.date.now, tp.file.title and tp.file.cursor are translated to their result; other Templater expressions are removed rather than left in the note, since the plugin can't evaluate them.

An existing note is never overwritten — creating someone who already exists just opens them.

Tiers

A tier is just a cadence. Defaults, all editable:

Daily use

Reach out (Who should I reach out to?) is the main ritual. It queues your most-overdue people and shows each person's note — the things you already wrote about them — so there's something concrete to say. From there: log the contact, snooze, open the note, or skip.

The dashboard (ribbon icon, or Open dashboard) lists everyone by urgency, with a hairline under each row showing how far through their cadence they are. Tabs cover Due, Tracked, Unclassified, Birthdays and Paused. Clicking a “last contact” date opens the note it came from.

The status bar shows a live count of who's waiting.

Undo

Every write the plugin makes is reversible. Confirmation toasts carry an inline Undo link bound to that action, the dashboard header has undo/redo buttons showing what they'd affect, and both are in the command palette.

Undo works on whole-file snapshots, which makes a bulk contact import a single step. Before restoring, it checks the note still looks the way it did after the change — if you edited it in between, the undo is declined rather than overwriting your edit. A multi-file undo that fails partway rolls back what it already wrote.

History is per session, capped at 50 actions and 32 MB.

Google Contacts

Import contact details from a Google Contacts export… fills in email, phone, company, title, location, prm-birthday and prm-relationship (from Google labels) by matching names.

Export from contacts.google.com as Google CSV or vCard; both current and older column layouts are handled. Then:

• Names are matched through aliases, ignoring accents, honorifics and word order, so Rivera, Sam and Dr. Sam Rivera both find Sam Rivera. Non-Latin scripts are matched too.
• A name matching two notes is reported as ambiguous and never applied.
• Existing values are kept unless you turn on overwriting — and that's re-checked at the moment of writing, so a value you edited after the preview is never clobbered.
• Notes titled with just a first name only match if you opt in.
• A contact with no matching note can be resolved in place: Create note makes one using the settings above, or Link to… attaches the details to an existing person whose note is named differently. Both join the same review list.
• Nothing is written until you've reviewed the full list of changes, and the whole import — creations included — is one undo away.

This is a file import, not a live connection — re-export to refresh. A live sync would need a Google Cloud OAuth client of your own, which a distributed plugin can't ship.

Frontmatter

Everything the plugin writes lives in prm- keys, so it won't collide with your existing fields.

The contact importer also writes plain email, phone, company, title and location keys — deliberately un-prefixed, since they're useful to Dataview and to you independently of this plugin.

Effective last contact is the most recent of any dated-note mention and prm-last-contacted, so logging a text message works alongside journaling.

Known limits

• prm-* values are read from frontmatter only. Dataview inline fields (prm-tier:: close) are not read, because that would require reading files from disk on every index.
• For someone you've never contacted, the cadence counts from the note's creation date. If no creation field is found the file's timestamp is used, which sync and git clone both reset — those rows are labelled estimated so you can tell.

Commands

• Open dashboard
• Who should I reach out to?
• Triage unclassified people
• Log contact with… / Log contact with this person (today)
• Set contact cadence for this person
• Snooze this person
• Jump to person
• Import contact details from a Google Contacts export…
• Undo last change / Redo last undone change
• Rebuild index

No hotkeys are bound by default — notably, undo is not mapped to Cmd+Z, so it can't interfere with normal editor undo. Bind it yourself if you want one.

Changelog

See CHANGELOG.md.

• 1.2.0 requires Obsidian 1.13.0 for its declarative settings API, which puts every setting in Obsidian's settings search. Older Obsidian versions are served 1.1.0 automatically.
• 1.1.0 changed how contact is detected — links in unchecked to-dos, quotes, code blocks and embeds no longer count — so some people may appear less recently contacted after upgrading.

Development

npm install
npm run build                          # typecheck + bundle
PRM_OUT_DIR="/path/to/vault/.obsidian/plugins/personal-crm" npm run build
npm run dev                            # rebuild on change

PRM_OUT_DIR sets the install target; without it the bundle lands in the repo root. Reload the plugin in Obsidian to pick up a new build.