HUMANS 101
When Was the Last Time You Looked at Your Phone Contacts?
Why this is the one spring cleaning task you should take on this year
I got a new phone for my birthday, and, although phones now set themselves up through the mysterious sorcery of The Cloud, it felt like the right moment to clear out my contacts.
My contact list has transferred over from phone to phone since I was in college. Somehow, some contacts had duplicated themselves, so I had like eight “Aaron Tinder”s glaring at me every time I opened my contact list — and I have no memory of going on a Tinder date with anyone named Aaron.
Phones are like little houses we carry around, and so they’re rife with organizing potential. I like to organize my apps by color, which is also how I like to organize the books on my actual bookshelf. I like to edit my photo library when I’m on an airplane without Wi-Fi. But preening my contact list is something I’d never done. It felt like too much work. There is no easy way to do it directly from your phone; you have to individually open each contact and delete it. Who has time for that?
There’s a way to do it faster from a computer (here’s a How-To, for iPhone users), which is what I learned by Googling. This felt doable, and I took it on…
