Never Delete Your Contacts

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How many contacts do you have in your phone?

Google tells me I have 805 in total. Yet, in the past week, I have texted a whopping 22 of them for a measly 2.7% engagement rate. With such a large portion of my contacts clearly unused, why don’t I delete some numbers?

For one, contacts take up negligible space on our phones. In the 1990s, when mobile phones were first becoming popular, contacts were stored directly on SIM cards, and early models maxed out at 20 contacts. Storage was at a premium, forcing people to be judicious with whose numbers they saved.

But it has been more than a decade since SIM storage capacity was a relevant factor. The Motorola Razr, a flip phone so iconic it was included in the celebrity gift bags at the 2005 Academy Awards, had 5.6 megabytes of storage space. The average contact file¹ is less than 10 kilobytes in size, meaning the Razr could have stored roughly 560 contacts — in addition to the 250 or so contacts that mid-2000s SIM cards could hold.

By the start of…