Last interaction and Needs follow up
Brick records the date of every exchange you have with a contact. Most of these dates arrive on their own, from your synced mail, your texts, your calls and your calendar.
What counts as an interaction#
Five things count:
- An email either of you sent, from your synced mailbox or from Brick.
- A text either of you sent.
- Any call that ended: answered, missed, voicemail, or no answer.
- A meeting from your calendar, once its start time has passed.
- A call, text or meeting you logged by hand, once the moment you gave it has passed. See Log a call, text, or meeting.
Mail that Brick sends you does not count. A search alert is not you talking to a client.
The eleven fields#
Last Interaction is a column on your Contacts and Deals tables already. It shows the most recent contact of any kind.
Ten more fields are available. Add them from the column picker, under First Interaction and Last Interaction:
- First and Last for each channel: Email, Text, Call, Meeting.
- First and Last across all four channels together.
- Next Meeting: the next meeting you have booked with them. It sits below the two groups in the picker, because the other ten look back and this one looks ahead.
You can sort and filter on all eleven. You cannot type a value into them. They are Brick's record of what happened, and the way to add to that record is to log the call, text or meeting itself.
A deal takes its dates from the contacts on it. Next Meeting on a deal is the soonest meeting with any of them.
Log what Brick did not see#
Brick cannot see a call from your own mobile, a message on WhatsApp, or a meeting in a cafe. None of these dates move until you enter it.
Point at an interaction cell in the Contacts table, filled or empty, and a + appears at the right of it. It says Log a call, Log a text or Log a meeting on the matching channel column, and Log activity on First Interaction and Last Interaction. The Email columns have none, because there is no logged email. Next Meeting has none too: log a future meeting from a Meeting column, and it fills Next Meeting.
Log a call, text, or meeting has a recording of this, and of each other way to log.
A future date is allowed. It moves nothing until the moment passes, so Last Interaction can never read "in 3 days". A future logged meeting is the exception: it fills Next Meeting at once, as a booked meeting does.
Full instructions: Log a call, text, or meeting.
Read a date without leaving the table#
A cell shows relative time, such as "10 days ago". Point at it and a card opens.
The card gives the exact date and time, then the interaction itself: the email's subject and first line, the text's body, who called and for how long, or the meeting's title and hours. If the conversation is still in your Inbox, the card has an Open conversation link.
When the date comes from something you logged, the card reads Logged call, Logged text or Logged meeting, with the date and your summary. It shows no clock when you gave no time, and it offers no Open conversation link, because a logged activity has no conversation.
A meeting takes up to 15 minutes to appear in Next Meeting after you book it.
The Needs follow up view#
Your Contacts views include one called Needs follow up. It lists everyone you have not contacted for four weeks, oldest first.
The four weeks is relative. The list moves with the calendar, so you do not have to edit it.
Contacts you have never spoken with are not in this view. A contact with no history is usually junk, and follow-up means people you have talked to. A booked meeting does not count until it has happened.
This is an ordinary view. You can rename it, change its filters, or delete it. If you delete it, Brick does not put it back.