Categorizing People

Posted on March 27, 2008. Filed under: Personal Stuff | Tags: Art, Bible, Blog, Christ, Christian, Health, Health care, sin, work |

I was idly going through the contacts on my handheld PDA the other day while returning from a business trip, and I decided I needed a better system to file people. I have roughly 400 people in my PDA under the following categories:

65 “Business – Home”
130 “Business – Work”
30 “Faith”
150 “Personal”

I decided to rename “Business – Home” to “Residential” for contacts like Comcast, and AT&T, North China Retaurant. I have enough to make another category, “Health Care,” and that’ll give me roughly 30 contacts per category.

Then I can rename “Business – Work” back to just “Business” again. There are so many in that category, though, I can separate them into “Travel,” “Clients,” and “Vendors.”

“Personal” needs work. I can separate them into “Friends,” “Family,” and I dunno what else. “Faith” was originally for contacts at the church like pastors and bible study friends, but they all sort of blur together at this point. What to do with somebody you originally worked with but became good friends with and you rely on his Christian counsel? What to do with people in bible study that you became good friends with? What to do with a friend with great faith who you hired to do work around the house?

And what about somebody you don’t particularly care for but you need to keep their contact information for some reason? Do you still file them under “friends?” I don’t really want to make a category for, say, “Irritating people” that only has a couple of names in it.

Surely somebody reading this blog organizes their information like me. Ok, maybe not like me, but how do you organize your contacts?