What to Write in Your Contact Notes (So Future You Actually Knows Who This Is)

You met someone good six months ago. You know that because you wrote a note at the time, and here it is, in full:

Nice chat, follow up.

Follow up about what? Nice in what way? You are now doing the thing that note was supposed to prevent, which is sitting with a blank message trying to reconstruct a conversation from nothing.

Notes are the quiet half of staying in touch. Reminders tell you when. Notes are the only reason you have anything to say when the reminder arrives.

Why most advice about notes is wrong for you

Search for how to write contact notes and you get guidance built for sales teams: log the interaction type, record the sentiment, capture decisions and next steps, and make sure a colleague who has never spoken to this person could pick the record up cold.

That last instruction is the one that quietly ruins it. Writing for a stranger means writing everything, because you cannot know what the stranger already has in their head. Full sentences. Context around the context. A little structure so it is scannable by someone else.

You do not have a colleague. You have future you, who already knows an enormous amount and has simply lost one specific thread. Notes for future you can be fragments. They can be private jokes. They only have to do one job.

Will this make the next message easier to write?

That is the whole test. Anything that passes it belongs in the note. Anything that does not is admin theatre, and the cost of admin theatre is not wasted minutes, it is that you stop taking notes at all by the third week.

The four lines worth writing

Almost every useful note is some combination of four things.

Where you met and how. Not the venue, the hook. "Sat next to me at the Bristol indie meetup, we both left the keynote early" is a note. "Met at conference" is a filing label. The hook is what lets you open a message without sounding like you are reading off a card.

What they are working on right now. One line on the actual problem in front of them, in their words if you can manage it. Not their job title, which you can look up and which will be wrong by spring. The problem is the thing you can ask about later, and asking about it is what makes you memorable.

What anyone promised. Both directions. You said you would send the pricing teardown. They said they would introduce you to their old CTO. Unkept promises are the most common reason a warm contact quietly cools, and they are nearly always forgotten rather than refused.

The one question you would ask next time. This is the line people leave out, and it is the one that does the most work. Write the question while the conversation is still live in your head and future you inherits an opening line instead of a blank page.

That is it. Two or three lines, ninety seconds, done.

A bad note and a good one

Here is the note most people write after a genuinely useful conversation:

Spoke to Elena at the London meetup. Founder, doing something in logistics. Seemed interested. Follow up in a few months.

And here is the same conversation, written to the four lines:

Met at the London indie meetup, we both bailed on the closing panel and ended up in the pub. Building route planning for small courier firms, stuck on getting drivers to actually use the app rather than their own WhatsApp groups. I said I would send her the onboarding email we rewrote in March. She offered to introduce me to Sam, who runs ops at a courier firm in Leeds. Ask whether the WhatsApp thing got better.

The second is barely forty seconds longer to write. Six months on, the difference is total: one of them needs a rescue operation, the other writes the next message for you.

Notice what the good note does not contain. No sentiment score. No interaction type. No tidy structure. Nobody else is reading it.

Write it before you get to the car

Detail decays faster than anyone believes. The version you have walking out of the building is sharp; the version you have at home that evening has already lost the specifics and kept only the impression; the version you have a week later is largely reconstruction.

So the note happens in the gap. Waiting for the train, standing outside before the next call, in the two minutes after the video call ends and before you open your inbox. This is also why notes need to be one-handed and thumb-sized. A note you can only write at a desk is a note you will write approximately never, which is the same reason a personal CRM has to survive contact with a real week rather than a tidy imagined one.

Conference days break this rule by volume, and they need their own handling. Fifteen conversations in one afternoon will beat any in-the-moment system, so batch them in the evening while they are still recoverable, which is half of following up after a conference working properly.

Where the line is

Keeping notes about people is not creepy. Forgetting that someone told you their father was ill, and breezily asking how their quarter went, is worse than any note you could have written.

But there is a line, and one question finds it reliably. Would you be comfortable if they read this?

"Moving house in October, ask how it went" passes easily. It is the kind of thing a thoughtful friend remembers without a system, and a system is only standing in for the memory you do not have. Something you would delete in a hurry if they were looking over your shoulder does not pass, and the right response is not to phrase it more carefully. It is not to write it down.

Two practical corollaries. Things told to you in confidence stay out, however useful they would be. And keep less than you think: a fuller record is not a more considerate one, it is just a larger thing to maintain.

Notes go stale, so let them

The other failure is notes that were true once. Company sizes, funding stages, job titles and "currently hiring" all age badly, and a note that is confidently wrong is worse than no note, because you will act on it.

Two habits handle this without ceremony.

Prefer the durable thing. What someone is trying to do outlives what their title is. "Wants to stop doing client work by next year" will still be the right thing to ask about long after their job title has changed twice.

Then edit rather than accumulate. When you write a new note, spend ten seconds deleting the line that is no longer true. This is what stops a contact record turning into a wall of archaeology, and it fits naturally into the quarterly check-in, where you are looking at the person anyway.

Notes belong with the person, not the inbox

All of this only pays off if the note is in front of you at the moment you need it, which is the moment you are deciding what to say.

A note buried in an email thread fails that test. So does a note in a document you would have to remember to open, which is the underlying reason remembering to follow up is not a memory problem. If you have to go looking for the context, you will write a vaguer message instead, or none at all.

Keeping notes attached to the person is the middle piece of the Who / What / When loop: who they are, what was said, when to make contact next. When the reminder arrives carrying the note with it, the message takes a minute and sounds like you remembered, because you did. Without that, even good notes become a backlog to trawl through, and trawling is exactly what makes contacts go quiet for a year.

So: four lines, ninety seconds, written before you reach the car, honest enough that you would not mind them being read. Then put them where the reminder will find them, and stop paying for conversations you have already had.

FAQ

What should I write in a contact note?

Four things: how you met, what they are working on right now, anything either of you promised, and the one question you would ask next time. That is enough to write a natural message months later. Everything else is optional, and most of it will be out of date before you read it again.

How long should contact notes be?

Two or three lines. If a note takes more than about ninety seconds to write, you will stop writing them within a fortnight, and a habit you keep beats a record that is thorough. Length is not the thing that makes a note useful. Specificity is.

When should I write the note?

In the first few minutes after the conversation, while you are still walking to the car or waiting for the next call. Detail decays faster than almost anyone expects. A note written the same evening is noticeably vaguer than one written on the spot, and a note written a week later is mostly invention.

Is it creepy to keep notes about people?

Not if you apply one test: would you be comfortable if they read it? Remembering that someone was moving house or waiting on a diagnosis result, so you can ask kindly, is ordinary decency. Recording things you would not admit to recording is the point where it stops being a note and starts being a file. If a detail fails the test, do not write it down.

What should I not put in contact notes?

Anything sensitive you were told in confidence, anything you would be embarrassed to be seen keeping, and anything that will be untrue in three months. Job titles, headcounts and funding stages all age badly. Note what someone was trying to do rather than the passing facts around it, and you will have to correct yourself far less often.