Why is contact management an unsolved problem

I live and breathe inside my contacts and calendar apps. It’s where I organise my life¹. I organise my daily life, and my contact list is my repository for all the people I need, be it professionally or in my private life.

Calendar

Of course, like many people with jobs, I have to use Outlook at work. And while I’m generally not a fan of Outlook for emails, the calendar function generally works fine, as long as you only have one calendar. I have about three calendars: personal, work, and scouting².

I have separate calendars for these three usages: Outlook for work and scouting; personal is in Apple Calendar.

To keep them all together, I use Fantastical. Fantastical is great; the interface is really intuitive. It works on my laptop, phone, and also pops up on my smartwatch.

There’s not much of a problem between work and the other two, as I basically have more or less fixed work hours. Fantastical does an impressive job at merging them all together, and can also move an event from one calendar to another seamlessly.

Overall, this setup works well. I check my phone at work with my merged calendars to see if work has an event that is outside normal working hours.

Contacts

Currently, I have one contact list synced through iCloud, and work contacts are also in Outlook.

The work and private split is generally fine since there’s not much overlap. Our admin staff also manage work contacts, so they are typically kept up to date.

Contacts for scouting are a bit of a mess, since I typically know these people by their scouting names. There is, of course, overlap between private life and scouting. There are lots of my contacts for scouting, and I don’t know all of them very well, so I also have to keep track of their role and what they are doing. This is especially useful to find the right person to contact. Further complicating this, we have a national database for all the scouts, which, unfortunately, not all people are keeping up to date very well.

I use Cardhop for managing my contacts. Cardhop works really well but is lacking some more advanced features in comparison to Fantastical. Somehow, I can’t figure out how to move a contact from one provider to another, not in Cardhop, not in the Apple Contacts app.

As a consequence, these are now all mixed up in my contact list, but somehow this still works a bit, which is nice. My wish would be for Cardhop to add more advanced features. Top of my list: let me move my contacts between providers.

So why is this contact thing still so hard?