Try this. Think of the last wedding you attended. You can probably see the hall, where the food was laid out, which side your family sat on, and the man you spoke to for twenty minutes near the entrance about his transport business.
Now say his name.
Gone. Completely. And yet you can still see the entrance. That gap is not a fault in you. It is how memory works, and every phonebook ever made ignores it.
Places stick, names do not
A name is an arbitrary sound attached to a face. There is nothing to hold on to. A place is different. A place comes with a picture, a direction, a smell, the weather that day, who you were with. All of that hangs together, so pulling on one piece brings the rest along.
This is why you can lead someone to a shop you visited once, four years ago, but cannot recall the shopkeeper who served you. It is also why "the tailor near the temple" is a perfectly good way to describe a person, and "R. Krishnan" is not.
We describe people by where they are. Then we file them under a name and wonder why we cannot find them.
What to write down, and when
The window is small. Everything you need is in your head for about a day after meeting someone, and mostly gone by the end of the week. So the work has to happen at save time, not later.
- • The place. The market, the hall, the site, the office, the exhibition ground.
- • The occasion. A wedding, a site visit, a delivery, a stall at a fair.
- • Who introduced you, if anyone did.
- • The month. Not the exact date. The month is enough to place it in a year.
- • One thing they said. He handles Bangalore route. She stocks silk only. This ages better than anything else.
Five things, about fifteen seconds. Put them in the notes field of the contact, which is searchable on both Android and iPhone and is almost always empty.
Doing it on a normal phone
- 1. Save the number as usual, but write the name as name, trade, area. Ravi Transport Hosur Road.
- 2. Scroll down to Notes and add the line. Met at Priya wedding, October, sent by Anil.
- 3. If you have a photo of their card, or of the shop board, keep it for now and delete it once the details are in.
- 4. On Android you can add a label such as Wedding October so everyone from that day sits together.
Six months later, searching the word wedding brings back all nine people you met that day. You will not remember which one ran the transport business, but you will recognise him the moment you see the list.
The wedding problem
Weddings and trade fairs are where this breaks worst, because you meet many people in one afternoon and every one of them blurs into the next. Nine cards go into a pocket and come out as a pile of white rectangles that could have come from anywhere.
The habit that fixes it is doing the pile the same evening rather than the following week. Sit down, save all nine, and write the same one line on every one of them. Wedding of Priya, October, Hyderabad. You have just turned nine unrelated strangers into a group with a story attached.
Ahoyy saves the place along with the person, so you can look for a contact on a map instead of scrolling a list. If you remember the market and not the name, that is enough to get to the number.
See contacts on a mapWhen only the place comes back
If you never wrote anything down, you are not finished. Your phone kept several records of that day without being asked. Each one turns a place back into a name.
| You remember the day | Photo gallery, sorted by date. Then the call log for that day is a short list. |
|---|---|
| You remember paying them | UPI history. The bank shows the real name on the account. |
| You remember the shop | WhatsApp profile photos. Shop owners often use their own board as the picture. |
| You remember who introduced you | One call. This is the fastest route of all, when you wrote the referrer down. |
| You remember only the area | Search that area in Contacts. If you have ever put areas in names, it comes back. |
The gallery route is the one people forget they have. Photos are stamped with the date and often with the place, so finding the wedding finds the day, and the day narrows the call log to about six numbers.
Between those four, most lost contacts turn up. It just takes twenty minutes instead of fifteen seconds.
The point of writing the place down is not tidiness. It is that in two years the place will still be in your head when the name is gone, and a contact you can no longer find is the same as a contact you never made.
There is a nice side effect once you have done it for a while. Contacts stop being a list and start being a map of your own life. Everyone from that market. Everyone from that building site. Everyone from the year you lived in Pune. You start seeing groups of people who belong together, and a group is much easier to hold in your head than nine hundred names sorted by alphabet.