Organizing Addresses and Contacts
October - December 2008

It is that time of year when we are preparing to send holiday cards. Is there anything more frustrating than losing an address or phone number of a dear friend or family member? In this busy world, our connections are the most important part of our lives! Whether it is an address of a friend, a phone number of a service person, or an email address of a work colleague, organizing our addresses and contacts is vital.

Begin organizing your addresses and contacts by gathering them all together. It is difficult to find things if these are all over your home, office, purse or in numerous computer email accounts! Once gathered, sort through to decide whether to keep the contact and if it is the most up to date.

Determine what categories your contacts are and how you will use them. There are business contacts, service providers for your home, holiday card addresses, family cell phone numbers, friends’ email addresses and snail mail addresses. Decide if you will keep all of these together or will you create sub-categories. For service providers, many people choose to keep the business cards in a notebook with sheet protectors. In this format the cards can be reviewed visually. For frequently used cell phone numbers and email addresses, many people keep these contacts in their blackberry, personal digital assistant (PDA) or cell phone for easy calling and retrieval. Make sure to back up your information weekly in case your equipment fails. Knowing how and when you will use different contact information makes accessing it and creating your addresses books much easier.

Updating your system is an important routine! Set aside a basket or other drop spot in your family command center to hold torn envelopes and other slips of paper with new addresses. Add this new information once a month to keep it most current. If you use a paper address book, be sure to write in pencil. The compact Levenger Circa address books have a separate card for each contact, so whenever a person’s information changes, simply replace the old card with a new one. This can be found at www.levenger.com. If you use a PDA or cell phone, simply update and then synchronize. If you wish to change from a paper to an electronic format, start with baby steps and enter 10 addresses at a time on a regular basis. Add new addresses as you get them and in no time you will have transitioned.

The time spent in organizing your addresses and more is the best gift you can give yourself for the holidays! What better way to celebrate than connecting with those who are special to us!

For more tips on organizing, visit the Tips Archive (left column). Please call or email me if I can be of assistance!

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