Put everyone in your database, personal relationships too, and prioritize afterward instead of filtering at the door.
The idea
Should your personal relationships go in your database? Yes. Past clients will sit next to your plumber and top prospects next to vendors, and that's fine. Your database should mirror reality, so capture too much rather than too little. As I put it in the book, "A pristine database of only 'relevant' people is a false idol." Relevance changes, and every guess about who belongs is a chance to guess wrong. Storage costs next to nothing. Your time is what to ration. Bring everyone in, then bring order with prioritization.
How to do it
Import from every source: work and personal email, phone, calendar, social exports.
Skip the filtering at the door. No "is this person relevant?" debates while importing.
Let duplicates merge on email address.
Then prioritize: A for people you genuinely enjoy connecting with regularly, B for periodic check-ins, C for everyone else.
Spend manual effort only on the people you've prioritized.
Example
Years ago, at a fraternity conference, I met Mark Zuckerberg back when Facebook was about 10 people. We have plenty of mutual connections, and I still wonder what would have happened if I'd stayed in touch. Nobody can tell in advance who will matter, which is exactly why "relevant people only" is a bad rule for what goes in.
Watch out for
Confusing included with active. Everyone goes in; focus your proactive outreach on your A's.
Relatable: Relatable keeps everyone it finds in your email and calendar in an uncategorized queue, a safety net you never have to clear. How-to: Review the contacts Relatable found for you.
Related frameworks
CAPITAL: Aggregate: Build one database you own with everyone you know, fed automatically from email, calendar and phone, as the base for everything else.
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.
Automate the Pull: Connect email, calendar and phone so your database fills and updates itself, then merge duplicates on email address.
Prioritize, Don't Organize: Organizing contacts by category tells you nothing about who matters; prioritizing tells you where to spend your time.