[_odey]

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?

[_odey]

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?

[_odey]

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.