Someone offered me a job recently. Which is always nice, even though I always say no. It is endlessly reassuring to learn that some of your professional peers hold you in high esteem.

This particular professional peer went on to ask me if I had any other contacts I could recommend. My mind drew a blank, but I volunteered to browse through LinkedIn and see if anyone sprang to mind. Surprisingly, however, this task took far longer than I had anticipated and delivered no great reward.

Was there really no one that I could put forward?

Over the course of our careers, we tend to remember most of our colleagues, our favourite clients and our least favourite clients, and a random assortment of other contractors, partners and associates, mostly for random reasons. But we also forget people who don’t deserve to be forgotten. People who brought something to the table. People who, even for the briefest of moments, had a positive impact on our lives.

I’m increasingly worried that I’m forgetting too many of these people because they’re getting lost in the noise of my sprawling LinkedIn network. When I log in each morning, I’m greeted largely by irrelevant posts from total strangers. I know their names, I know where they work, I know their preferred gender pronouns, I just have no idea who they are – or why we’re connected.

It’s like I’m starting every work day by dialling into the wrong meeting.

If you’re reading this, rest assured that these comments don’t apply to you. I know they don’t, because you’re reading this. I’m 100% confident that the random, distant connections in my network have zero interest in my creative output. Why should they? They have no idea who I am either.

And this strikes me as a problem. What if the good people, the value-add people, the people I’d love to get in touch with or hear from out of the blue, are being obscured from view by all of these LinkedIn strangers? What if everyone is experiencing the same issue? What if we’re all wasting our time sending ‘congrats’ messages to people we barely know, when we should be focused on rekindling lapsed relationships with people who would almost certainly make our professional lives better?

I’ve taken the time to curate and trim my other social channels. On Twitter, I only follow my favourite bands. On Instagram, my feed is populated predominantly by Dua Lipa updates, which is fine by me. But on LinkedIn, I’ve always worked to that ‘must grow’ mindset – the sense that, unless someone is sending me truly unsolicited spammy nonsense, I can have no good reason for refusing their connection request.

A change in approach is needed. What’s the use in having 20 different freelance graphic designers in your network if you can’t vouch for any of them? Or if your network has become so vast you can no longer find the graphic designer you actually rate?

I have no idea how other professionals solve this problem, or if indeed anyone else thinks it’s a problem in the first place. But if you’re reading this and thinking that it’s been too long since we last connected, it’s a safe bet to assume that I miss you too.

Photo by Jack Castles on Unsplash