The P in CAPITAL - decide who matters most right now and focus there, because you can't give everyone in your database equal time.
The idea
Prioritize is the third step of CAPITAL, and it answers one question: who should I talk to today? Your database holds everyone you've ever known. That is not the same as the people you need to stay close to, or the people who need to remember you. Those are a subset, and you have to pick them. The hard reality is that some relationships matter more to your goals than others. Putting relative weight on people feels uncomfortable, but skip it and you'll misallocate your time.
How to do it
Start from your goals. Know why you're investing and which types of people help with each goal.
Prioritize instead of organizing. Labels like "CEOs" or "DC" don't tell you where to spend time.
Sort into three tiers, A/B/C, by gut, and give A's the most time and effort.
Shrink the active list. Keep everyone in the database, but proactively focus on the few.
Bump anyone mid-decision or just through a life event to the top.
Rebalance at least quarterly.
Example
In the book I laid out elaborate bucket taxonomies for this step: types of clients, tiers within each type, and so on. I've since written that those appendix pages are what I'd rip out. Every contact turned into fifteen or twenty decisions, and people gave up. Today I keep it really simple, A/B/C, for pretty much everyone.
Watch out for
Don't try to stack-rank every contact one by one. It's a recipe for disaster.
The CAPITAL Strategy: Seven linked steps for building relationship capital: C (Consistent execution), A (Aggregate), P (Prioritize), I (Investigate), T (Timely engagement), A (Add value), L (Leverage).
A/B/C Spheres: Sort everyone into three tiers by gut feeling (love, like, don't know) and spend more time on A's than B's, and more on B's than C's.
Prioritize Around Your Goals: Before sorting anyone into A/B/C, name your goal and the types of people who help with it, so you know whose names to look for.
Addition by Subtraction: The fewer people you actively focus on, the more you can do for each; keep everyone in your database and let software watch the rest.