
Ask HN: How do you organise your contacts list on your phone? - masked_titan
I have over 2000 contacts on my phone. I managed them by adding the context (work&#x2F;meetup&#x2F;cycling etc) to the name itself but now I&#x27;m drowning in contacts I don&#x27;t remember when or where I met them and why I bothered to save their number or email. Just adding one context to the name field didn&#x27;t help me at all.<p>So, how do you manage and organise your contacts and add context on your contacts app?
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sdwolfz
I have nowhere near the number of contacts you do but something that helped
was having a section in my notes app dedicated to them where I write as many
details as possible, like if they are a friend, relatives, coworker, how we
met, their birthday, favourite color/food/drink, eye color, etc. Think of it
as a personal CMS or a CRM. Your phone's contacts app might not be a good fit
for such a system, for example I'm using orgzly for this, and I sync it to my
laptop for backup and easier editing. Also, the contacts app and orgzly are
not connected/syncronized in any automatic way, from time to time I take a
look in both and see which contacts are still relevant or not and adjust. For
example there is probably no reason to keep around the phone number and notes
of the Airbnb host from my vacation 6 months ago so I remove that.

As advice for how you can manage your 2k+ contacts I suggest you use a similar
app (in case you don't want orgzly for some reason) and just type in their
name, contact info (phone, email, social media) and a one sentence fact about
them. Let's say do 5 a day, and group them by relationship type: family,
friends, coworkers, teachers, etc. Then try to remember as much about them as
possible, even follow up with some you don't remember and ask some questions,
like "Hello, I have you in my contacts list but I don't remember how we met,
sorry about this, but can you refresh my memory? Should we still keep in
touch?". Feel free to customize that as much as you want. In the end you'll
probably end up with just a few hundred that you really want to keep around.

~~~
masked_titan
Hey, thanks for the reply. This seems like a good way to start organising my
contacts. I have a couple of questions about your system - 1\. Do you have one
note per contact? 2\. Do you lookup the notes each time you want to find out
the context about some contact? Seems a little tedious, is it not?

~~~
sdwolfz
1\. Yes, one note per contact.

2\. Yes, if I don't remember something about someone, I'll look them up by
name and read the notes.

It's not tedious for me as I have less than 100 contacts that I manage this
way.

To give you a description of how it's layed out, top level is the Notebook,
which is titled "people". This is the file in which I store all data. Then I
have the tree structure with H1 groups, aka Family, Friends, Workplaces,
Enemies ;), etc. Under that I have my H2, which are their names, or in the
case of Workplaces I have the company names I used to work at, then the H3
with names. Under each name I have a free text filed where I type everything,
this would be my "note" for that person. But if I wanted to I could nest even
more headers and add more structure, it's just that I don't feel the need to.
The app lets me add tags and arbitrary key value metadata, but it seems
overkill for me.

I also use this app to manage other things, like workout schedule, a backlog
of FOSS ideas, shopping, interviewing, investing, and others, both high level
and low level. It's quite flexible.

~~~
masked_titan
This seems like a good system. You have organised by importance, tagged by the
main context of friends/family etc and also added notes to them.

I was looking more closely at the Google's Contacts app I never realised there
are labels (tags) and also ability to add custom fields and notes too. Did you
ever think of storing all this data (notes) in the contact itself so that if
you ever exported all contacts all that data is available right there with
you?

~~~
sdwolfz
To be honest I don't really care about my phone's contacts app as I almost
never use it. But if it works for you then go ahead.

