Longtime is a personal contact manager built for keeping up with the people you do not see often. Here is what it holds, and how the pieces fit together.

Signing up

From invitation to a Space that is ready to use, step by step.

The interview

Tell Longtime about a person, or a time you were in touch, in your own words.

Cadences

Choose the people you would hate to lose touch with, and how often you would like to hear from them.

The dashboard

Where Longtime tells you who is due, what needs confirming and whose birthday it was.

What Longtime is for

Most contact managers are built around a pipeline. They assume the people in them are leads, that contact is a step toward a transaction, and that the useful question is who to chase next.

Longtime assumes none of that. It is built for the people you would like to stay close to and lose track of anyway — the friend two time zones away, the cousin you see at weddings, the colleague from three jobs ago. Nothing here is a deal, and there is no next step.

It does the remembering — when you last saw someone, when it is time to reach back out, whose birthday is coming — so you can do the reaching out.

Your first ten minutes

Finish signing up and set up your Space — see Signing up.
Your dashboard opens an interview straight away. Tell Longtime about one person.
Then tell it about the last time you were in touch with them. After that, the menu fills in — People, Connections, Bridges — and you can start an interview from the top of any page.
If they are someone you would hate to lose touch with, give them a cadence.
Bringing in a whole address book? Import a vCard file instead — see Demand Bridges.

The pieces

Everything you keep in Longtime lives in a Space: one set of people, the connections you have had with them, and a subscription. Most people have one Space. See Spaces.

Inside a Space there are a handful of kinds of things, and everything else is built out of them.

People

A person is the unit everything attaches to. A person holds names — including a nickname and a former last name, so someone whose surname changes does not become a second record — along with email addresses, phone numbers, addresses, a birthday, a timezone and a free-text About field. Your own record is in there too, marked "YOU!". See People.

Connections

A connection is a record that you were in touch: when, what kind of contact it was, and who was there. One connection can involve several people, because a dinner with four friends is one evening rather than four separate events. Connections can be in the past, or planned for the future. See Connections.

Occasions

An occasion is a stretch of days — a trip, a wedding weekend, a week at the lake — that frames the connections that happened during it. See Occasions.

Longtime adds up how long you spend with each person — a connection's Hours, from its start and end. An occasion does not add to that total, because a long weekend is not seventy hours of one conversation; the connections inside it do.

Notes

A note is a dated entry you add to a person, a connection or an occasion. Where a connection records that something happened between you, a note records something you want to remember. Add one from the note box on any of their pages; notes appear in the history there. See People.

Connections and notes are different on purpose

A connection answers "when did we last speak?" — which is what a cadence (how often you would like to be in touch, below) measures against. A note answers "what do I know about this person?" Keeping them apart is what lets reminders be about contact rather than about everything you have ever written down.

Circles, cadences and Pools

Circles are your own labels for groups of people — "Book club", "Dad's side". A cadence is how often you would like to be in touch with someone. A Pool is a saved People search that keeps itself up to date, like "everyone in my Family circle" for the holiday cards. See Circles, Cadences and Pools.

How things get in

There are two ways information gets into a Space.

The interview is how you add and update things day to day. Start it from the top of any page, say what happened or who someone is in your own words, and Longtime turns it into entries you review before anything is saved. Adding a person or logging a connection by hand always starts here; to bring in many at once, import a file through Bridges. See The interview.

Bridges move things in and out of your Space: files you import or export, calendars you bring in or publish, and short-lived links that share one person's details. See Bridges.

Anything Longtime is not sure you want waits in Suggestions until you accept it: a calendar event, an imported record, or something you sent there from the interview. The one exception is an import you choose to apply: new people are added straight away and empty details filled in, without ever overwriting anything you have. See Suggestions.

Staying in touch

Two things in Longtime tell you it is time to reach out, and both show up on your dashboard.

A cadence works out when the gap since your last connection with someone has reached what you meant it to be. See Cadences.

A birthday shows up on the day and stays for a week, with a quick way to record that you sent your wishes. See Birthdays.

The dashboard is the reminder

Longtime does not send reminder emails or push notifications. Reminders are on your dashboard, waiting for when you sit down to look.

What Longtime will not do

These are deliberate, and they are unlikely to change.

No sign-in with Google, Apple or Microsoft. Longtime never asks for access to your other accounts, so there is nothing running in the background and nothing to revoke.
No automatic syncing with other tools. Data moves in and out only through imports, exports, calendar feeds and share links (Flash Bridges) you set up yourself — and a calendar you bring in only ever proposes.
Nothing in your Space changes without your say-so. The interview and calendar feeds produce entries for you to approve, and so does an import unless you choose to apply it.
AI only where it saves you typing. It turns what you write into tidy entries, lets you search in plain English, and suggests where an imported column belongs when its name doesn't say. Your words never train anyone's models, and the companies that build the models never see them. The details are in the AI notice.
No tracking or advertising. No cookies on the marketing site, no display ads, no marketing email.
Deletion is real. When you delete something, it is gone — there is no trash to recover it from.

Support comes from a real person, by email, at support@longtime.app. The reasoning behind each of these is set out in the policies.

Words Longtime uses

Word	Means
Space	Your set of people, connections and occasions, with its own subscription
Account	Your login — your name, email, password and two-factor
Person	Anyone you keep track of, including you
Connection	One time you were in touch with one or more people
Occasion	A stretch of days that frames the connections during it
Note	A dated entry on a person, connection or occasion
Circle	Your own label for a group of people
Cadence	How often you would like to be in touch with someone
Pool	A saved People search that keeps itself up to date
Suggestion	A proposed change, waiting in your Suggestions inbox
The interview	Telling Longtime things in your own words
Bridge	Anything crossing the edge of your Space — Demand (files), Constant (feeds), Flash (links)