Log four things when you meet someone, and nothing else.

The note that says 'great guy, follow up'

Three weeks after the conference, you open a contact note on your phone. It reads: "Great guy. Follow up re: pilot." You don't remember any pilot. You don't remember the guy either.

The next note over has the opposite problem. Two hundred words typed in a hotel elevator, mostly his company's funding history, which you could have looked up in thirty seconds. Somewhere in the middle is the one thing you promised to send him.

You were trying both times. Neither note works.

Most people who give up on contact notes quit after a few rounds of exactly this. The notes don't help, so why write them? The habit is fine. The notes just have the wrong shape.

What should you write down after meeting someone? Four fields.

Contact notes fail because nobody ever agreed on what "context" means. So people guess, and they end up at one of two extremes: a shorthand that only made sense in the moment, or a transcript nobody reopens.

The four-field note gives every contact the same four lines, and nothing else.

Where you met. The event, the room, the session. Every other memory of the conversation hangs on this.

What they said they're working on. In their words, present tense. Their actual project, which is rarely what their title suggests.

What you committed to. The intro, the deck, the pricing sheet, the call next Tuesday. If you owe nothing, write "nothing owed." That counts as information too.

One distinctive detail. Something that came up in this conversation and no other. It's the cue that brings the rest of it back.

Four fields are enough to write a follow-up that shows you were paying attention. Add a fifth and the note starts drifting back toward a wall of text.

Why 'capture everything' advice backfires

The usual advice comes in two versions. One says write down as much as you can while it's fresh. The other skips notes altogether and teaches name tricks: repeat the name back, link it to an image, use it three times in conversation.

Capture-everything sounds safe. In practice, the extra text buries the one line that matters. The commitment you made ends up in paragraph two, between their Series B and a comment about the venue coffee, and you won't find it quickly when you're writing the follow-up at a gate between flights. You'll skip any note you have to dig through.

Name tricks fix a problem you mostly don't have. The name is on the badge, the card, the email signature and the LinkedIn profile. What's gone by Friday is everything else: why you talked, what they need, what you promised.

So neither approach works. One gives you too much to reopen, and the other gives you nothing worth reopening. A fixed set of fields beats both. You can fill it in during a hallway conversation and read it in a cab.

What memory research says about the fourth field

The first three fields are practical. The fourth, one distinctive detail, is the one people drop first. It also has the most research behind it.

Hermann Ebbinghaus published his forgetting-curve experiments in 1885. They showed that people forget new material fastest in the period right after learning it. That's why you write the note at the event, not on the flight home.

Endel Tulving and Donald Thomson's encoding specificity principle (1973) explains why where-you-met matters so much. You recall something best when the cue you have later matches what was around you when the memory formed. The room, the panel, the booth are all cues.

Then there's the isolation effect, described by Hedwig von Restorff in 1933: an item that stands out from the ones around it is remembered better than they are. Sixty conversations at a trade show blur into one long talk about pipelines. The detail that broke the pattern is the one you can still pull up.

None of these studies looked at business contacts, so take them as a direction rather than proof. They all point the same way, though: pin down the place, and keep the oddity.

The four-field note, walked through

Say you run partnerships for a freight-visibility software company, and you're working a regional logistics expo. Mid-afternoon on day two, you talk for a few minutes with an operations lead from a cold-storage company. They're stuck reconciling temperature logs from three different carriers. You offer to send a short case study. As you're both walking away, they mention they used to be a pastry chef.

The typical note: "Cold storage ops, interested, send stuff."

The four-field note:

Where: Logistics expo, day 2, outside the cold-chain panel. Working on: Reconciling temp logs across three carriers. Owe: Cold-chain case study, by Thursday. Detail: Former pastry chef.

That's four short lines, and twelve days later they still work. The follow-up is mostly written already. You open with the panel, name the three-carrier problem, attach the case study you promised, and keep the pastry line in case the thread gets friendly. The typical note gives you none of that. You end up with a generic follow-up, and generic follow-ups get archived.

What doesn't make the cut

The harder half of the rule is what you leave out. Job title, company size, funding stage, headcount: you can look all of it up, and copying it into the note just buries the four lines you can't look up. Your verdict on the person ("sharp," "bit much") ages badly and gives future-you nothing to act on. A full play-by-play of the conversation is the wall of text all over again.

Cutting all that changes what the note is for. A four-field note is the outline of the follow-up email. Where you met becomes the opener. What they're working on becomes your reason for writing. What you owe becomes the attachment. The detail becomes the line that shows a person wrote this.

So every field gets the same test: does it end up in the follow-up? If not, leave it out of the note.

Where the four fields get written

The four fields work in any notes app, on the back of a card, or in a text to yourself. The hard part is writing them in the hallway, before the next conversation starts and the last one fades. Our piece on the 72-hour memory cliff is about that moment, and Met is built around it.

Met's Event Mode keeps the room captured while you keep talking, so logging where you met and the one detail doesn't mean leaving the conversation. The context stays attached to the contact, which is where the follow-up draft starts. And because storage is iCloud-only, what people told you stays yours instead of sitting on someone else's server.

Use the four fields on every contact at your next event. When you feel like adding a fifth, don't.