A few weeks ago, I talked about contacts. That conversation was specifically about using Outlook. Last week, I talked about something else by mistake. This is a follow up to the Contacts email from a few weeks ago.

Headaches happen. Mine is in my Contact folder on my iPhone. For as brilliant as the folks at Apple are, they need a slap upside the head on others. How they set up the Contacts database is one of those.

Consider this scenario… You get an email from someone and you want to store their contact information. You open the email, select the email address, press the little “i” for information, then scroll down, and select “save as a new contact”. Simple, right? Not so fast.

Did you ever check where that contact is actually stored? Of course not. You go to send the person an email the next time, and there is the contact in your contacts folder. Great, right?? Yes, if it were only that simple. You see, the contact has to be stored in an account that houses your contacts. The Contacts app on your phone is simply that – an app that retrieves all of the contacts stored in different databases and places on your phone.

Say you have your work email account, a junk email account (for mailing lists, etc.), and a personal email account all on your phone (like I do). In the account section of the phone, you can select what other tools you’d like to have active on the phone (like contacts, calendar, notes, etc.). Most people don’t pay attention to this, they just select what Apple pre-selects (like I did). This means that I have 3 accounts and all three have an active Contacts database. Here’s where Apple sucks.

One of these Contacts databases will be the default database – where new contacts are all saved UNLESS you manually go in and change this before saving each contact. What if you forget (like everyone does), or don’t even know to do this (like 99% of the people who have an iPhone)? All of your contacts will go into the default contacts database. No big deal. Who cares? You should!!

Do you want your personal contacts being saved in with your work contacts? You shouldn’t. Or vice-versa? Nope. Not there either. They SHOULD be separate. Apple, in their brilliance, assumes that we only want to add to one contact database, so they don’t even give an option of where do you want to save this contact to?

So, fine. I still don’t see why this is a problem… I use a junk email address. It’s a Gmail account that is on my phone, but it’s unmonitored. Somewhere along the line, that became my default contact database. Guess what happened when I removed that Gmail account from my phone? Yep – all the contacts went with it. Almost 300 of them. Poof!! Gone. Some personal, some work. I had to re-add the Gmail account, take all 300 contacts and manually add them to my personal iCloud contact database, delete them from Gmail, then forward each work contact to myself to re-add in the work contact database (Outlook), and finally go back in and delete the work contacts from my iCloud account. Now everyone’s happy…

So, on an iPhone, here’s what I would suggest. Decide on which contact database will ALWAYS be your default. Go to General Settings –> Contacts –> set default to this account. If you have a contact that you want to save in another account, go to the same place, change the default to that database, save the contact, then go back in and change it back. Handy…

You know, I’m pretty sure you can do this the first time on Android… Just sayin.

Happy Professionalism. Enjoy your work/ life balance.