Ask HN: How do you organise your contacts list on your phone? I have over 2000 contacts on my phone. I managed them by adding the context (work/meetup/cycling etc) to the name itself but now I'm drowning in contacts I don'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't help me at all. So, how do you manage and organise your contacts and add context on your contacts app? |
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.
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.
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?