How to Organize Contacts to Maximize Productivity
Use your desktop address book to store your contacts now and forever.
My friend Asheen has been cursed with the need to travel to the underworld. I mean, Silicon Valley. In order to find some fiends—I mean friends—to lunch with, he went to LinkedIn. But to his horror, and LinkedIn’s delight, the site refused to let him search his contacts. LinkedIn gave him an alert. He had exceeded his search limit for the month and would have to upgrade to a paid plan to access information about his very own contact list.
Welcome to the 21st Century.
We trust third-party providers with all our our important data. Why? It makes life simpler, particularly when you’re on the go. And this being the 21st century, “on the go” is the new black.
But we need our contact data! Handing it off to cloud providers leaves us open to extortion. How do we avoid extortion by address book, while keeping up convenience? We put the information in our address book on our local machine, and we use our own system to track it.
Go Local
To start, copy your cloud-based contacts into a local contacts book. If you’re on a Mac, you can do this in just a few quick steps. First, go to System Preferences, then from there to Internet Accounts. You’ll see a list of accounts (if you don’t, click the plus button in the lower left).Â
Click on one with some contacts you want to grab, and enter your login information. It’ll pop up a list of apps that the account will interact with, including Contacts. Click Sign In to connect the account and wait a few minutes for everything to synchronize. Soon, your Contacts app will contain all the contacts from that account. If you change your mind later, you can disconnect the account, with the option of removing the contacts you got from it, by clicking the minus button in the lower left of the same menu. What could be easier?
What, indeed? Well, I’m sure Windows is even easier! So for all you Windows users, I won’t patronize you by giving you the instructions. Microsoft, on the other hand, surely has plenty of “documentation” lying around that will tell you everything you need to know. And as my friends who use Windows assure me daily, it’s far superior to the Mac in every way, so I’m sure it will be easy peasy to do the same thing from your Windows machine.
Note Nearby Cities
Now that you have a local copy of your contacts, prime your address book for travel. Put the names of nearby cities and regions in the notes field of each entry. For example, if a contact lives in Brooklyn, New York, you would put “New York area” in the notes fields. Then you can find out who you know in the area, with one quick search.
Include all the major cities and regions near them. Then you only need to search for “New York” and you’ll get everyone who lives in surrounding towns and burroughs.Â
A physical copy provides a backup in case a device runs out of power
Once he organizes his contacts this way, Asheen can check out who to meet up with. And he doesn’t even need the “cloud.” Because we all know “Fly-fi” sucks, just another reason why a local contacts book on your computer is handy.Â
In his case, he just tags everyone in San Francisco, Mountain View, Redwood City, San Jose, Atherton, Palo Alto, and Oakland as “Silicon Valley.” He filters his contacts for the keyword “Silicon Valley.” Everyone nearby pops up. And now he might discover that his much loved and respected second grade teacher lives in Marin county and runs a Grandma Cuddles Daycare franchise!Â
But while Asheen wants to see Ms. Bowie, he also wants to get out of his hotel and head out for some hardcore socializing with friends. But … He needs a way to find out what activities people are into.
Use Your Contacts Book to Record Interests
Again, the Notes field comes to the rescue. Add interests to the notes field of each contact, so you can find things to do when you travel, too. Now it’s easy to find everyone whose interests line up. Bowling, Movies, Sustainability, Kinbaku. You can list it all, and make sure you don’t end up doing the wrong thing with the wrong people. Grandma Cuddles wouldn’t approve.
On his last trip, Asheen met a set of triplets at The Abbey, doing penance for their past sins. He noted that their interests are knitting exciting underwear (why do you think they needed to be penance?), making Oreo ice cream, and listening to Rock and Roll. This trip, he looks them up and immediately has three ideas for things to do. He’s feeling wholesome, so he chooses Oreo ice cream cake as the evening’s activity. Obviously.Â
Since he’s up for a group activity, he does a quick Contacts search for Oreo ice cream cake and quickly discovers several other Silicon Valley friends who share his passion, including … his second grade teacher! So tonight he’ll get to have his cake and freeze it, too.
Keep Your Contacts on Paper
You should also make a paper copy of your local address book. It’s well established that during any form of apocalypse—Nuclear, Zombie, or Vampire—the power grid gets fairly unstable. With a paper contacts list, you’ll still be able to call your Bruce-Willis-esque friend to come rescue you from your Julia Roberts-esque emergency. Assuming, of course, that the phones still work.
A physical copy also provides an instantly accessible backup in case a device runs out of power, breaks, or gets lost. When Asheen’s phone dies in the middle of dinner with his old teacher, it might spell doom for his plans for a late night cookie binge with the triplets. Fortunately, though, he planned for the worst, and kept a paper contacts list in his coat pocket. It’s a simple enough matter to borrow the teacher’s phone after the show, look up the triplets’ numbers, and quickly pin down those details.
Don’t trust the Cloud with your most precious data! Own your own community! Download copies of all your contacts on a regular basis. Import them into your address book and use the notes field to code people’s locations and interests. Socializing becomes a snap, and with a paper backup copy, you’re good to go even if the power isn’t. You a local contact address book, and beat cloud extortionists at their own game!Â
This is Stever Robbins. Follow GetItDoneGuy on Twitter and Facebook. I run webinars and other programs to help people be Extraordinarily Productive, and build extraordinary careers. If you want to know more, visit SteverRobbins.com.
Work Less, Do More, and Have a Great Life!
Image courtesy of Shutterstock.
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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.Â
