Dr. Jeffery Hall is not a journalist by nature. He’s a professor at the University of Kansas, author of the book “Relating Through Technology” and a researcher. But when an editor for the Wall Street Journal invited Dr. Hall to write a piece based on his work, he couldn’t let the opportunity down.

“For years, I’ve been studying things related to friendship, social interactions and also the offline/online relationship around social media and texting,” Dr. Hall said in an interview with the Foreign Press. “During the pandemic, these issues have become extraordinarily important, as people turned alife that was more composed of an offline connection to a much more online one.”

Dr. Hall spoke to the WSJ about zoom fatigue, how people can connect during the pandemic and whether they are going to maintain their social habits through the media once life becomes more in-person. These conversations led to the creation of Dr. Hall’s article What We Lose When We Don’t See Our Work Acquaintances.

The piece explores the importance of workplace relationships and the effects the pandemic has on those connections. In the article, Dr. Hall wrote “for all of us working remotely, it was as if all our workplace neighbors up and left.”

“We don’t keep in touch well,” Dr. Hall said. “It doesn’t matter who you are or where you live in the world. We’re just not good at it.” People move away, get married, start a job, have kids and in the process, their friendships drop off. “The reality is we barely keep in touch with only a few friends, over the course of years, that we don’t see face to face.”

There are not enough hours for a person to commit to all their connections. Once someone moves away, they go on with their lives. However, this gives people the space to build new relationships, join new communities, leave old identities behind and build a new sense of self. According to Dr. Hall, it’s healthy and good for humans not to get stuck in the past.

Dr. Hall’s advice for maintaining and strengthening relationships is simple:

* Tighten the circle: Focus your attention on the most important people in your life. Make it a priority to keep in touch with your 15 closest relationships.

* Strengthen the signal: This comes in two forms. Increase your conversation’s quality and intention -- take the time to catch up, joke around, and hang out with people. And increase the signal of modality. “I think of it as a ladder,” Dr. Hall explained.

“The top of that ladder is face-to-face conversations and free time to hang. Slightly below that is phone calls, slightly below that is video chats, slightly below that is text messaging directly, slightly below that is text messaging into a group.”

“And below that,” Dr. Hall continued, “is browsing social media, which you might as well not even count because all it does is keep you aware of other people. It doesn’t mean you’re active.”

* Build a routine: Make a plan to keep in touch. Put it on your calendar to spend time with a person.

For those concerned that working remotely has caused them to lose their socializing skills, Dr. Hall says don’t worry. “It takes way too long for people to actually full-on lose social abilities they’ve built their entire livelihood on prior to (the pandemic),” he explained.

“Instead, what I think is likely is there’s going to be a lot of awkwardness to figure out how comfortable people are with stuff,” like hugging or hanging without masks. “People may attribute that awkwardness to a lack of skill, but the reality is, this is really weird. No one knows what’s safe or appropriate.”