How to organise your phone contacts

Start by deleting, not by organising

An address book that has been running for ten years is mostly archaeology: the letting agent for a flat you left in 2016, three numbers for a company that no longer exists, a taxi driver from one holiday. None of it will ever be searched for, and all of it is what makes scrolling useless.

Go through the list once with a single question — would I ever ring this? Delete on the first no. A thousand contacts usually lose a third of their entries in twenty minutes, and every pass after this one gets faster because of it.

Merge the duplicates before you rename anything

Duplicates come from the same person arriving twice: once from the SIM, once from an email account, once from a messaging app. Renaming both halves of a duplicate is wasted work, so merge first. Android's Contacts app has a Merge and fix screen that catches exact matches; the near-matches are yours to find.

• Same name, two numbers — keep both numbers on one contact.
• Same number, two names — keep the name you would actually search for.
• Mum and Mom, or a mobile saved twice with and without the country code — these never show up as exact matches.
• A name with no number and no email is not a contact. It is a note you left yourself.

Name people the way you would search for them

The name field is a search index, not a label. If you would look for “Ahmed the electrician”, then that is the name. If you have four people called Ahmed, none of them should be saved as Ahmed.

Pick one convention and apply it to everybody: given name, family name, then the thing that tells them apart. Which convention you choose matters far less than using the same one every time, because the search box only rewards you when the distinguishing word is always in the same place.

Label the twenty you actually need

This is the pass everyone wants to start with, and the one to leave until last — by now the list is short enough to see. Labels, which Android calls labels and TreeLinker calls tags, are for the contacts you look for by role rather than by name: the dentist, the plumber, the school, the four people you would ring in an emergency.

Do not try to label everybody. A taxonomy you will not maintain is worse than none, because it makes the list look organised while quietly being wrong.

What tidying cannot fix

None of this tells you who these people are to each other. An address book is a flat list by design: it knows Angelina's number and Micheal's number, and nothing about the fact that one is the other's sister. If the thing you keep losing is which cousin, whose in-law, or who is calling, that is a relationship problem rather than an organisation problem — and it is the layer TreeLinker adds on top of the list you have just cleaned up.