A way of naming contacts that still works in two years

Every phonebook in India has a tiffin aunty. It made perfect sense on the day. There was one tiffin service and one aunty. Two years and two house moves later, there are three of them, none of them are near you, and you have no idea which is which.

The fault is not memory. It is that we write contact names for today and read them years later. On the day you save someone, every detail about them is still in your head, so the name only has to be a small hook. Two years later the head is empty and the hook is all you have.

A good contact name is written for the person you will be in two years, not for the person you are while typing it. That sounds like extra work. It is about eight seconds.

Why single word names fail

• • They only make sense while there is one of that kind in your life. The moment there are two, the name is useless.
• • They cannot be searched. You will search for the trade or the place, and a name like Aunty matches neither.
• • They are embarrassing. That name shows on your screen when they call you back, and it shows in a screenshot you share.
• • They do not survive a phone change. Names like New, Sir and 2 come across looking like errors.

The three part name

Write the name, then the trade, then the area. In that order. It reads naturally, it fits on a screen, and any one of the three parts finds the person.

Now type ac and every AC man appears. Type Aundh and everyone in that area appears. You have stopped needing to remember names at all, which is the whole point, because names are the first thing anyone forgets.

One rule to keep it working. Write the trade in the words you would search. If you always say AC, do not write air conditioning. If you say maali, write maali. The name should match the way your own head works, not the way a form would want it.

Use the company field, it is searchable

The company or organisation box on a contact is fully searchable on both Android and iPhone, and hardly anyone fills it. It is the right home for the shop name, the firm, the school, the society.

This keeps the visible name short and readable while the shop name is still findable. Anand stays Anand Kirana Sector 12 on screen, and Sri Anand General Stores sits in the company field, so a search for either one lands on him.

Labels and groups

Android calls them labels, iPhone calls them groups, and a person can be in several at once. Labels answer the question the name cannot: show me all of a kind.

• • Keep six or seven labels, not thirty. Customers, Suppliers, Staff, Family, Society, Government office covers most people.
• • Add them in bulk from contacts.google.com on a computer, where you can tick many rows at once.
• • Use labels for sets you need to reach as a group, not for describing people. Description belongs in the name and the notes.
• • A label you have not opened in six months should be deleted. It is only making the list longer.

The notes box does the heavy lifting

The notes on a contact are searchable and almost always empty. Ten words written on the day you meet someone are worth more than any naming system.

1. 1. Where you met them. The wedding, the market, the site visit.
2. 2. Who introduced you. This is the one detail that lets you check up on them later.
3. 3. What they quoted, and whether the work was good.
4. 4. The month. Prices and phone numbers both change, and a date tells you how much to trust what is written.

The best contact name is the one you would have typed into the search box.

Fixing what you already have

Do not open the whole list and start at A. Let your call log pick the order for you, because the people you call are the people whose names need to work.

1. 1. Open the call log for the last two weeks.
2. 2. For each name, rewrite it as name, trade, area.
3. 3. Move the shop name into the company field.
4. 4. Write one line in the notes while you still remember the job.
5. 5. Do twenty minutes and stop.

Within a month or two the people you actually deal with are all named properly, and everyone else sits quietly at the bottom of the list where they do no harm. A phonebook does not need to be perfect. It needs the names you use every week to come up on the first search.

There is a second half to this that is easy to miss. You are also a contact in a few hundred other phones, and you have no control over how those people typed your name. Some have your first name only. Some have your firm and no name. Some have you as the trade you did for them once.

The only way to fix that side is to hand people something they can save in one tap, so your spelling, your firm and your number go in exactly as you want them. That is what a card with a Save contact button does. You stop being an entry somebody typed in a hurry at a wedding.