Contact Book 📕

Five years ago, I was finally fed up with the daily quest of locating my keys. I lost them. Every day. I had to locate them. Every day. Sometimes twice a day!

Soon, I realized that I spent too much of my precious time on locating my keys. It was time for a change.

The Organized Mind

There's one book that helped me never having to locate my keys again.

It described my problem precisely:

Few of us feel that our homes or work spaces are perfectly organized. We lose our car keys, an important piece of mail; we go shopping and forget something we needed to buy; we miss an appointment we thought we’d be sure to remember. In the best case, the house is neat and tidy, but our drawers and closets are cluttered.

— Organizing Our Homes from "The Organized Mind" by Daniel Levitin

The solution was simple:

For keys, a bowl or hook near the door you usually use solves the problem [..] The system depends on being compulsive about it. Whenever you are home, that is where the keys should be. As soon as you walk in the door, you hang them there. No exceptions. If the phone is ringing, hang the keys up first. If your hands are full, put the packages down and hang up those keys! One of the big rules in not losing things is the rule of the designated place.

— Organizing Our Homes from "The Organized Mind" by Daniel Levitin

It was about time I established habits to better organize my life. And I didn't stop at my home.

I went digital too. One place that definitely needed better organization was my contact book. While the hook next to my door was the designated place for my keys, could my contact book be the designated place for everything related to the people in my life?

Contact book

The beauty of the contact book is that it's a metaphor of long-gone days.

Days, when people used a paper book to note down all the contacts that mattered to them:

• Names.
• Birthdays.
• Addresses.
• Phone numbers.

As a kid born in 1990, I've never had a physical contact book. I think I was too young for that. But I'm sure my mom had one of those (I asked her, it's true).

Nevertheless, the metaphor works. You can add all of these details of your contacts to your digital contact book, an app on your phone modestly called "Contacts".

And as my digital organizing quest continued, so I did.

You'll lose your keys

You got everything under control, right?

But there might be some cases, where you don't:

• You book an Airbnb and want to forward the invite to your friend via email. What was their email address again?
• You visit your friend's party. You've been at their place so many times. But what door were you supposed to ring at again?
• You're travelling and want to write a post card to your friend. What was their address again?
• You forget your friend's birthday. How could this have happened?
• You forgot the name of your friend's newborn daughter. What kind of friend are you, really?

You might think that the answer to all of these questions is simple:

Duh, I'll just ask my friend for their email address/door number/address/birthday/daughter's name in case I need it.

Well, of course you could.

But:

• Haven't you asked your friend for their email address hundreds of times?
• Haven't you asked your friend for their door number hundreds of times?
• Haven't you asked your friend for their home address hundreds of times?
• Maybe you shouldn't ask for your friend's daughter's name more than once?
• And I hope you don't ask your friend for the date of their birthday every single year.

Every time you don't have these pieces of information you're wasting your precious time. You're losing your keys.

Aren't you fed up by now?