You don’t need forty friends. You need a few who’d sit in a hospital waiting room with you.

Breadth and depth are different things, and only one of them shows up when something goes wrong. A large circle is pleasant and it thins out quickly under any real weight. What you actually need is a small number of people who would drop a day for you without being asked twice, and that number is smaller than most people expect.

Name the two or three for yourself and then invest like it. Reply to them first. Give them the time you might otherwise spread thin across people who would not notice if you went quiet for a month.