The contact distribution

So, I have been backing up my contact list since today morning. Something that I used to do every year before has not been done for a long time now (3 years+). Smartphones and Google has progressively made me dumb and lazy. I have been accumulating contacts without purging the list.

Lately, I have been obsessed with analysing all this data that I keep collecting. So I thought I bombard my readers with a simple frequency distribution of my contact list.

So what do I get from this? 1 in 5 of my contacts had a name starting with S! 85% of my contacts have names starting with S, A, P, R, M, N, V, K, D, T, L, J. I am fairly confident that if you are reading this blog post your name starts with one of the 10 that I just mentioned.

Interestingly, since 2009 I made a new  contact starting with an “O” and dropped a contact starting with a “Q”.

Purging this list of 385 people was an administrative nightmare for me. I first started doing it alphabetically, and as you can see, going through the A list itself took me a while. Hence the distribution. Then I gave up and started walking from the tip of the long tail. So the last of the people who got purged were from “S”. I successfully got down my list by 26% to 283 people. Now people with names T and L are not in the top 10. I haven’t done any analysis about men vs women and Indians vs non-Indians, but I am sure that would be more insightful.

Now for people who are as frustrated as I am with all the contacts lying all around the place. Here is a simple tip – use Google Contacts. Then if you have an Android Phone, make sure that you save all your contacts by default to Google. Also make sure that you setup groups of contacts. Then religiously purge your list every year so that it remains manageable and you get rid of spurious contacts that you tend to accumulate. Enjoy.

How to setup your phone to save all your contacts to Google:

Go to Phone > Contacts > Settings > Save new contacts to > Google.