How to import your contacts without making a mess

The first import is where most people quit. They connect every account they own, land four thousand contacts including every restaurant that ever emailed them, look at the result, and close the tab. The fix is not a better importer. It is importing less, on purpose.

Decide what you are importing before you import it

Your phone's address book is not your network. It is a cache of everyone who ever needed to reach you, and perhaps a fifth of it is people you would want a reminder about. Before connecting anything, decide which group you are building: the people you want to stay close to, or an archive. Both are legitimate, but they want different treatment, and conflating them produces a list you cannot act on.

A practical approach is to import broadly and then mark a small set as the ones you are actively tracking, leaving the rest searchable but silent. That way the archive exists without generating noise.

The sources, and what each is good for

• Google, Apple and Microsoft accounts: the best coverage of people you actually email and meet, and they stay current. A.R.O syncs contacts and calendars from all three, multiple accounts each.
• A CSV: the right tool for a curated list you built elsewhere — a spreadsheet, a conference attendee list, an export from another CRM.
• LinkedIn connections: the widest professional net, and the worst metadata. You get name, company, title and the date you connected, with no email for most.
• Manual entry: still the correct choice for the twenty people who matter most, because you will add the context that no import carries.

Run the LinkedIn export through something first

LinkedIn lets you download your connections as a CSV, and it is worth looking at before you import it anywhere. Ours is a free browser-based analyzer — it runs entirely on your machine, nothing is uploaded, and no account is needed. It shows the breakdown by company, role and year, the duplicates, and the people you connected with and then never spoke to again. That last list is usually the interesting one.

Insist on reviewing before it lands

An import that applies instantly is an import you cannot undo. The sane pattern is a preview: here is what will be created, here is what will be merged into an existing person, here is what looks like a duplicate. A.R.O does every import this way. If your tool does not, do a small test import of twenty rows before trusting it with four thousand.

Duplicates are not an edge case; they are the normal outcome of using more than one source. The same person is routinely three records: a phone contact with a mobile number, an email contact with a work address, and a LinkedIn row with a job title and nothing else. Merging them is what makes the record useful.

Clean up in one pass, then stop

Set aside thirty minutes once. Merge the obvious duplicates, delete the businesses and the no-reply addresses, and set a cadence on the people you want to hear from — see how often to keep in touch. Then stop. The urge to perfect every record is the enemy of using the thing, and empty fields on someone you contact twice a year cost you nothing.

After the first pass, maintenance is incidental: you add context when you learn it, right after the conversation where you learned it.