Managing Your Contacts
In the era of social networks, it’s not clear how to manage your address book. Until now…
Get-It-Done Guy listener Andrew writes in:
I’m very curious about how you manage your address book. I’ve got way too many contacts now and it’s becoming unmanageable – not to mention trying to manage contacts across my personal and work emails, LinkedIn, Facebook, etc. What do you use, Get-It-Done Guy?”
Handling contacts used to be done with a little black book, where we inscribed the names, addresses, and phone numbers of our friends. We would add code symbols to tell us who was nice, who was naughty, and who was so desperate they’d go with me to the high school dance. The book would fill up, and we’d copy it into a new book by hand. We might even “accidentally” forget to copy certain entries. All my exes may live in Texas, but I wouldn’t know because they didn’t make the cut.
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The computer age put our little black book online! Now we could search, print, group contacts, and stuff like that. And we could add names forever! Life was good.
Then networks appeared. We could share contacts with our assistant, boyfriend, girlfriend, spousal equivalent, and/or polyamorous family unit. Now life was even better, except we sometimes forgot that we had also just shared notes that we’d only intended for ourselves. Notes like “Lesley is a total bore, so never schedule long meetings.” Oops.
Then the Palm Pilot appeared and let us sync contacts between our desktop and handheld. Life was pretty much perfect.
Then came the internet and smartphones. For a few brief, shining moments, we synced our smartphones and contact books over the internet. Then every frickin’ web site in existence decided it wanted to become the center of our world of contacts. Now it’s a mess. But all is not lost! You can still straighten things out.
Here’s how:
Use a Single Master Book
I just returned from a 3-week trip to California, where I caught up with dozens of friends and completely missed several others. Why? Because my friends had profiles on different social networks that hadn’t been updated. They figured I’d magically know whether to find their latest on Facebook or LinkedIn or Plaxo or Cardscan or Outlook or Yahoo or whatever profile they use most. Argh!!
Choose a single place to keep your master address book and have your own copy of people’s information there.
Choose a single place to keep your master address book and have your own copy of people’s information there. When you hear someone has moved, immediately copy their information into your contacts book. It’s way easier to try to keep your address book up to date when you hear of changes than to try to figure out on the fly which of a dozen different online profiles of your friends is the right one.
Also, you want your address book on your desktop. Windows or Mac, your desktop address book integrates with your email and calendar. Plus, by keeping a local copy of everyone’s information, you’ll be able to reach them even if your internet access goes down or if the social network data gets scrambled.
Use a Program to Merge Social Networks
On the Mac and iPhone, I use CoBook. CoBook links my social networking sites to my desktop. It pulls contact info from current information, and gives me a composite view of a contact’s information with my local information and whatever’s out in The Cloud. I can see all of it in one place and decide which to use or import to my desktop.
Record Limited Information for Each Person
When you have too many points of contact, it’s hard to know which to use when, so keep your contact system as simple as possible. Don’t record all of a person’s information in your local contact book! For a work-only contact, get their work phone number and email address only. Also find out who to contact inside their firm if they leave someday and you need to get to their replacement.
If it’s someone you also have a personal relationship with, get their non-work info. But only one phone number and one email address. Ask them which of their dozen email addresses they check most often, and record that. Also record any email address that is likely to be permanent, like a college alumni email address. Get their cell number, as it’s likely to stay the same even if they move or switch carriers.
Scan Your Book and Networks Before Traveling
Before you travel, search your address book for everyone in cities you’ll be passing through. Because people check in when they’re traveling, or because they may have moved without telling you, also check the two main social networks.
On Facebook, type into the search box: “friends who live near” and then type the name of the city you’ll be visiting. I would have seen my old friends if only I’d typed, “friends who live near san francisco” before I left.
On LInkedIn, click the tiny word Advanced next to the search bar at the top. Then type the text “Location” in the middle column. The word Add will appear. Click that and add locations. In this case, I added “Greater San Francisco Bay.” This will show you all contacts in a given city, but not necessarily surrounding areas, that’s why….
Use Your Notes for Tags
…In each contact’s notes field, I put the name of the metropolitan area that they’re close to. That way, when I search for “San Francisco,” contacts in Menlo Park, Redwood City, San Jose, and Black Rock City all pop up, even though I didn’t search for them individually.
This is almost like tagging my contacts with a San Francisco tag. And indeed, I use a contact’s notes field for exactly that. I just type in hashtags like #party for people I want to invite to parties, #gamesday for people I want to come play board games, and #zombiefood for people I don’t want to come play board games. Invite lists are a cinch; I just search for the relevant hashtag.
Print a Hardcopy
Sometimes your smartphone might run out of power. Or get stolen. Or your cell phone company deactivates the line due to a clerical error and simultaneously lock syour phone so you can’t even get to the contacts book. (Yes, really!)
That’s why I recommend always printing out your travel contacts on paper, with at least names, email addresses, and phone numbers before you leave on a trip.
Every so often, print your entire contact list on paper. If you don’t know anyone’s contact info by heart—and who does, anymore?—you want a way to find it in case of emergency. When the zombie apocalypse arrives, your next door neighbors will be undead, but your cell phone will be dead-dead. You’ll need to call your friends to come heroically to your rescue. Since your phone is out of power, a paper backup is only sensible. This advice also applies to earthquakes, tsunamis, and One Direction concerts.
Prune Your Book
Since electronic contact lists can grow forever, get in the habit of pruning as you go. When you notice a name you don’t recognize, move it into a contacts folder called “Deletion Candidates.” Then every so often, delete every contact in that folder. And don’t feel guilty about it. They haven’t called you in ages (the meanies!) so there’s no reason you should call them.
Do this a little at a time in your daily browsing of your contacts book. I tried going through my entire 3,600-person contact list at once. It took hours!
Andrew, I hope this helps you tame your address book. To summarize: Use a single address book, merge in data from social networks, and try to limit yourself to one phone number and one email address per contact. Scan your social networks before traveling, take a paper copy on trips, and prune your contacts as you go. Hopefully the chaos won’t drive you crazy. And by crazy I mean … zombie apocalypse.
Check out more tips about organizing your life at get it done guy. You can connect with me on Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn.
Contacts image courtesy of Shutterstock.
About the Author
Stever Robbins was the host of the podcast Get-it-Done Guy from 2007 to 2019. He is a graduate of W. Edward Deming’s Total Quality Management training program and a Certified Master Trainer Elite of NLP. He holds an MBA from the Harvard Business School and a BS in Computer Sciences from MIT.
