Contact management
Two kinds of information about a person
Most contact management tools are built for the first kind: contact data. Name, company, email, phone number, address. It is structured, it changes rarely, and it is easy to store — every phone has an address book for it.
The second kind is context: what you know about someone from talking to them. Where they worked before, what they are working on now, who introduced you, the name of their partner, the thing they said they would send you. Context is what makes a conversation personal, and it is exactly what address books have no place for.
Good contact management covers both. In practice, most systems hold the data and lose the context.
Business and personal contact management
In a company, contact management usually lives in a CRM such as a sales system, and the contacts belong to the company. It is organised around deals, accounts and pipelines.
Personal contact management is about the relationships you own yourself: clients as a freelancer, people in your industry, former colleagues, investors, friends of friends. Tools for this are often called a personal CRM. The contacts go with you when you change jobs.
Common ways to do it
- The phone's address book. Always there, good for contact data, almost no room for context.
- A spreadsheet. Flexible and free, but every update is manual and it rarely survives a busy month.
- A notes app or a Notion database. Room for context, but you have to type it up and keep it organised yourself.
- A business CRM. Powerful, but built for sales teams, and the data belongs to your employer.
- A personal CRM. Built for individuals. Some import your contacts and remind you to stay in touch; others focus on capturing what you learn.
A simple method that works with any tool
- Capture right after the conversation. Context fades within days. A note made the same hour is worth more than a careful one made next week.
- One place per person. Whatever the tool, everything about someone should be findable from their name.
- Keep the source. Note when and where you learned something. "Said in March he might move to Berlin" is useful; "moving to Berlin" might already be wrong.
- Read before you meet. Thirty seconds with your notes before a call does more than any reminder.
Step one is where most systems fail, because it is the step that costs effort at the worst moment.
Where Rucksack fits
Rucksack is built for the context half, and for step one. After a conversation you speak for half a minute, or type. It files the facts under each person you mentioned, asks when a name could mean two different people, and keeps a link from every fact back to the recording — which takes care of step three.
It does not handle contact data: there is no address book, no import and no reminders. It is currently a closed beta.