How to remember people you meet at networking events Remember five things, not the whole night.

Most advice on remembering people is about remembering names. Names are the easy part: they are on the badge, in the email signature, on LinkedIn. What you actually lose is everything that would let you write a message worth answering. So capture the parts that do not live anywhere else.

Three of those five rows are not facts about the person at all. They are facts about the conversation: what the need was, when the moment is, and what you said. Nobody else has a record of them, and nothing will reconstruct them later.

The promise row is the one people skip and regret. “I’ll send you that article” is a small thing to forget and a large thing to be remembered for forgetting.

At an event you are meeting people back to back. Each new conversation overwrites a little of the last. By the time you are on the train home you will remember that you met “the logistics woman” and not what she needed or when.

So the habit is not “write notes after the event”. It is: step away, write one sentence, then go and talk to someone else. Thirty seconds by the drinks table. If you need an excuse, checking your phone at a networking event is the least remarkable thing anyone has ever done.

• Say it rather than type it. Every phone keyboard has a microphone key. Dictating one sentence takes about as long as saying it.
• Write it where the contact is. A note in a separate app is a note you will not find next to the name when you need it.
• Put the date in the sentence. “Next Tuesday” means nothing in three weeks. “Tuesday 29th” still does.

This is the real contacts page, on a demo account with made-up people. The sentence at the top was typed once; everything below it is what Cardr filed it into, waiting for a person to check it before anything is saved.

Two things about this are deliberate. First, nothing is saved until you press Save. The filing is a suggestion; you are the one who knows what she said. Second, the date is worked out in code, in your own time zone, from the words you used. “Next Tuesday” becomes a date on the screen, and the screen tells you which words it read.

Remembering someone this way is on the free plan, like every note. What Pro adds is being reminded on that day and having the message drafted from the sentence, which is the subject of when to follow up and what to write.

The honest ranking is: whichever of these you will actually use standing up, one-handed, with a drink in the other hand. A notebook beats software you do not open.

The note handles next week. In the room you still need the name for the next ten minutes, when someone joins the conversation and you have to introduce them.

• Say it back once. “Good to meet you, Priya.” Once, naturally. Not three times like a sales course.
• Ask about it. Spelling, pronunciation, whether they go by the short version. A question makes you process the name instead of hearing it.
• Hang it on the company. “Priya from Example Logistics” is easier to hold than “Priya”, and it is how you will introduce her anyway.
• Swap details before you part. If they have your details and you have theirs, the name is written down for you. With a Cardr pass the exchange is two-way: they scan your code, and their details come back to you in the same step.

The five facts map straight onto a follow-up. Where you met is the opening line. What they need is the reason to write. What you promised is the thing you attach. The timing tells you when, which is the part almost everyone gets wrong. We wrote the cadence up separately: the day, the week and the month, and a set of UK follow-up email templates built on exactly these five facts.

If you work a particular kind of room regularly, the details that matter change a little. An estate agent needs the move date, a recruiter needs the notice period, a founder needs the round timing. The method is the same.