How to Keep Business Cards Organized When You Travel
When you travel to a conference, you’ll probably end up meeting all sorts of people…now if only you could locate their business cards. Find out how to keep your business cards organized here.
When you travel to a conference, you’ll likely collect business cards of people you might want to contact, collaborate with, hire, be hired by, or avoid like the plague. If you’re like me, you accept someone’s business card and keep direct eye contact as you thank them, while carefully putting their business card in your jacket pocket. Or your wallet. Or your conference bag. Or in the plastic pouch on the back of your nametag.
By the time you return from the conference, cards are in so many different places that it’s easy to forget some of them, never mind take meaningful action on them.
To get the most out of your conference connections, decide in advance where you’ll put cards as you receive them. If my nametag has plastic pouch big enough, my policy is to keep incoming cards there. Otherwise, they go in my right interior jacket pocket. Those are the only places I ever put cards.
When I get back to my hotel room and take of my nametag, I immediately transfer the cards to a Ziploc bag I keep on my desk labeled “Business Cards from the name of the conference.” That way, all the cards are together, and when I get back to my office, I can go through the bag knowing I’ve dealt with each one.
For more tips about dealing with business cards, check out my episodes on How to Organize Business Cards and Use Your Smartphone to Organize Receipts and Business Cards.
Pile of Blue Business Cards from 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.
