Get Organized with Contacts, Email and Snail Mail Addresses

No one remembers your 7 – 10 digit phone number or your Venmo account name. Happily this is all automated for us now.  Your contact list is a combination of your closest connections and lots of possible vendors and business people. Keeping your list up to date makes it easier to work together and also saves you time trying to find information. Here’s how to organize this area to make it easy and seamless for you.

Consolidate

You want your information in one place. Currently it could be in many different locations such as icloud, gmail, or any other email system. This might be the hardest part of this project. Where do you want to keep your contacts? If you have used Outlook, it’s often the easiest place to keep this information.  Google and gmail are a good choice if you use gmail as your native email account. Google syncs with all phones and transfers easily.

Name

Consistent naming helps you remember who and what to look up in your phone. You might be storing contacts for a new roof or doctor. Or you could have met a contact at a recent event and want to connect later. Having a consistent practice for entering information into your contacts helps!  Decide if you want to enter Name, Business (business name and what that business does).  That would be Ellen Delap, Professional-Organizer.com, paper organizing. Keeping consistent also helps you keep the clutter in your contacts to a minimum.

Edit

Editing is a tedious job, so it’s a task we can do while sitting in a carpool line, waiting on a prescription or when we are low energy. Look through contacts and delete those that are not used or you can’t remember when you last contacted that person.

Update

When it comes to updating, it is best to take a minute and update as soon as you see new information. It’s easier to do this right away because your contacts are always current.

Backlog

Before you add new contacts from business cards or other scraps of paper, be sure you review first. Adding names and businesses just in case will not help you.

Power up

According to SalesForce, “Contact management is the process of recording contacts’ details and tracking their interactions with a business. Such systems have gradually evolved into an aspect of customer relationship management (CRM) systems, which allow businesses to improve sales and service levels leveraging a wider range of data.”  If you are overwhelmed with contacts in your small business, it’s time to power up to a CRM to help you with contacts and leverage this information.