yeah. I don’t delete contacts to save space, but more so just that I only want things on my devices that I will actually use / I actually care about.
One good reason to leave old contacts on your phone is if you have your anti-spam feature sending all unknown contacts straight to voicemail. An old contact could get through to you if they needed to. But getting sent to voicemail isn't so bad either, especially if you haven't talked in 10+ years.
I hate having to scroll through a bunch of contacts of people I haven’t communicated with in years.
What's this scrolling thing you speak of? If I'm going to call somebody, I say their name. I don't scroll down to them.
I have the power to curate my life so I prefer to do so lol.
I like this way of thinking about it.
About once every 2 years, I go through my contacts. It's too painful to do this every year, but every other year is a good interval for me. I have them in Outlook and in my Apple devices too, so it's a big effort to bring all of these things up to date on all of my devices.
Something I started doing for work contacts is instead of doing "company name" (and having twelve different spellings of "Service Now", for example, I will do "acronym-yy", so that I'll know when I last reviewed that person's contact info. If the person worked for a public traded company, I would use the ticker symbol. So John Doe from IBM might be Doe, John F. with company IBM-22. That way, 8 years from now, I can decide if I want to call my pal John who used to work at IBM in 2022. If I don't update somebody's card, then it just remains GE-03 or MSFT-19 until I purge it one day.
If you export your contacts from Outlook into a CSV, that makes for easy mass-editing in Excel. Filtering and sorting can make duplicate entries show up more visibly so that you can merge Jane Smith's four contact cards into one consolidated card, then label it Smith, Jane K. at AAPL-22.
When all the editing is done, just re-initialize Outlook, iOS, or Mac, my car, wherever, and reload the contacts into it.
