Siyi.app vs a Notion contacts database

Notion is excellent at what it is: a flexible database you shape however you want. A contacts table with columns for how you met, their major, last contacted and a notes field is a reasonable design, and for a few weeks it works fine.

The problem is that it is a place you have to decide to go. A database only helps if you open it, and the entire failure mode being solved here is that you do not think about the person at all until it is too late to be graceful about it. A table that requires you to already be thinking about someone cannot remind you of someone.

Capture friction. Adding a row means opening the app, finding the database, creating a page, and filling fields. That is maybe forty seconds, which is fine at your desk and impossible in a hallway. You tell yourself you will add them later, and later is where people go to be forgotten.

Dates do not act. You can put a birthday in a date column and even get a reminder if you set one, one at a time, by hand, forever. Nothing reads “said I’d send him the notes” and turns it into something that comes back.

Silence is invisible. The most useful fact about a friendship is how long it has been. In a table, “last contacted” is a field you have to remember to update — so it is accurate for the first month and fiction after that.

It is a project. Every hour spent tuning views and relations is an hour not spent texting the person. Systems that need maintenance get abandoned in exam season, which is precisely when you stop seeing people.

One sentence, in seconds, offline if you have no signal. Siyi.app picks the birthday, the promise and the timing out of what you wrote, and then comes to you — surfacing the person on the day it matters rather than waiting to be opened. Time since your last conversation is computed, not typed. There is nothing to configure and no view to maintain.

It is also private in a way a shared workspace is not: no feed, nothing shown to anyone, and no notification to the people you write about. You can export the whole thing as JSON or CSV and delete all of it whenever you want.

If your whole life already lives in Notion and you genuinely enjoy maintaining it, the table is free and it is right there. Some people do keep one alive for years. If you have already watched two of them die, that is the signal the tool is not the missing piece — the reminder is.

The college case covers what to write in that one sentence.