Coppice

Coppice is an iOS app for the people you keep meaning to contact and never do. One idea sits underneath it, and it is worth writing down because most tools in this space seem to miss it.

Reminding someone that a friend exists does almost nothing. Ask anyone who has drifted away from a close friend and they will tell you they thought about that person last week. The thought turns up at eleven at night, or mid-meeting, or on a train with no signal. By the time there is a free ten minutes, it has gone again.

A monthly nudge lands in those same dead moments. It fires on a schedule that has nothing to do with whether you are free, and it still leaves you to remember what is actually going on in that person's life before you can say anything worth saying.

So we built it around the moment rather than the frequency. You tell it about people the way you would tell a friend, by typing or just talking. Who you saw, what is happening with them, what you promised to follow up on. It watches for the ones going quiet and brings them up when there is a gap you can use.

It is aimed at people with ADHD, where out of sight really is out of mind, and where being told to try harder describes the problem rather than fixing it.

The part we are least sure about is whether the habit of talking to it survives past the first month for people who are not already note-takers. If you have shipped anything that depends on a logging habit, we would like to hear what made it stick.