One filing system is never enough

Open any serious contact tool and it will let you file a person exactly one way. They go in a folder, a bucket, a top-level category: Clients, Investors, Vendors, Partners. It is tidy, and it is the taxonomy the whole app is built around. The trouble is that real work does not respect it.

A management consultant does not think about her book in buckets. She thinks in service lines - the things she actually gets paid to do, like Market Entry, Growth Intelligence, Conflict Management. One client can sit inside all three. An investor she met last month might belong to Market Entry too. A bucket cannot say that, because a bucket gives each person one home, and the thing she needs to see is who is working on what, cutting straight across the buckets.

So I set out to add a second grouping layer - a user-created one that sits over the fixed buckets and groups the same people by what they are for. I went looking for who had already built it, across thirteen tools: HubSpot, Salesforce, Notion, Airtable, Monday, Attio, Folk, Clay, Google Contacts, Superhuman, Missive, Linear, and Trello. Each one had a piece of the answer. Not one had the whole thing. That gap is the story.