Your dentist and the person from Tuesday live in the same list.
That list is not neutral. It’s a junk drawer that learned to alphabetize. The dentist belongs there. You need a number, you don’t need a story, and the story would be weird. The person from Tuesday does not belong there. You need the story more than you need the number, and the list has no slot for a story, so it keeps the number and calls the job done. Months later you scroll past both of them with the same thumb and feel the same nothing. The drawer worked. The relationship didn’t have a drawer.
I cleaned mine once, on a Sunday, which is when people do fake administration and call it a life. Hundreds of rows. A plumber. Two people whose names I would not have been able to say out loud with confidence. A cluster from a wedding. One row I stared at for a while because I was sure it mattered and could not say how. I deleted a lot. I did not become better at knowing who to write. I became better at having a shorter junk drawer. Those are different projects, and the apps that offer to dedupe your contacts are working on the wrong one.
Reachability is a solved, boring problem. Email, a handle, a page. You can get it across a loud room in several ugly ways, and one of them will stick. The unsolved problem is that reachability without a reason is how you accumulate strangers you’re technically able to contact. Ability is not intent. The drawer is full of ability. Intent was the conversation, and the conversation was never invited into the row.
A contact is how you reach them. It is not why you would.
People try to patch this with the notes field. I’ve read those notes. “Met at the thing.” “Friend of Sam.” “Follow up.” They’re captions on a photo you didn’t take. Friend of Sam is a provenance, not a reason. Follow up is a command you issued to yourself and then ignored, which the field will store faithfully forever. The field isn’t the problem. The timing is. You’re asked to describe a person in a single line at the moment you know the least about what you’ll want later, and then that line becomes the whole file.
What I want instead is a split. The dentist stays in the drawer. The people you met on purpose live somewhere that still knows the night. Not a CRM, unless your job is the pipeline and you’ve made peace with homework. A place where Tuesday is a pile you can open, and the pile is small enough to recognize. Who they were. Where. Why you didn’t want them next to the dentist.
That split is what Dap is for. The connection from a real room gets kept against the event, with the page of links, instead of being poured into the same list as the plumber. You can claim the page now. The exchange that happens when two phones meet is the app, which has not shipped. I’m not telling you a sync will clean your address book. I don’t think your address book should be cleaned into a social life. It should be left alone to be a drawer, and the social life should stop being stored in it.
I’m not sure how many of the rows in a typical phone are even candidates for this. A lot of them are logistics, and logistics should stay boring. The damage is the handful of people who were not logistics and got filed as if they were. You can feel which ones when you see them. There’s a pause. You almost remember a room. Then the row offers you a button to call, which is the wrong button, and you move on. That pause is the product requirement. Something should answer it with the night, not with a dialer.
You will be tempted to export the drawer into something smarter and call that progress. If the export is still a flat list of ways to reach people, you moved the junk. You didn’t give Tuesday a place to live. The plumber can come with you. The person from the long table should not have to.
Stop asking the junk drawer to be a memory. It was built to find a number for a tooth. Let it do that. Keep the people you meant somewhere that still has the room attached, or admit you’re going to lose them and stop pretending the alphabet is a relationship.
