Contact management, the often overlooked part of 'Self Organization' has its own place in terms of having everything well organized. As I have mentioned in the productivity overview, having all your contacts organized in a single place helps you a lot in streamlining and improving your overall productivity. I had to spend 3 to 5 days to get all my contacts into a central location as I had them spread all over across several email accounts (yahoo, gmail, hotmail etc), work email, mobile, hand written phone book, IM chat logs etc. Everytime I had to contact someone, I atleast had to login to couple of email accounts to find their current email address or phone number.
And one thing is that, when people move between organizations, their contact information is often lost, as we don't have the information listed anywhere except in the 'Good Bye' email. It is rare for someone to send an email to that address after a gap of an year. Finding a person using 'Address Book' or Ctrl+K in Outlook is cool when you are at office, but when you are travelling or need to contact someone after a few years, you are totally at sea. To overcome such situations, you need a better way of managing your contacts. Social Networking is a powerful platform to keep in touch with friends and colleagues but sensitive personal information of mobile numbers and home phone#s being available to everyone in your friend's list is not advisable and doesn't go well with most of us. A few resources to help you in getting this act together are listed above. Now, phone number and email data is sensitive information (for most) as I said above but atleast by using the above services you have it only accessible to you unless you decide to share it. You got to trust SOMEONE....though not everyone. So, choose which one of the above works best for you and create your own contact management solution.It can be a combination of Outlook, Gmail, Mobile software etc...but the idea is, whoever you know should be reachable whenever you need to. After moving over to one of the above services, at least, my life has become a lot easier. I now sync up my Outlook, Gmail, Mobile and PDA automatically, which means that a phone number I jotted down while on call with someone makes all the way into my other tools/services automatically. So, it is always available to me when I need it and I make sure that it is available only for me. Plaxo - Your AddressBook for Life:
Plaxo offers a full fledged address book and calendar management solution. It allows you to sync up your Home and Office calendars and contacts, if you use Outlook. It also syncs up your contacts from Outlook, Gmail, Yahoo, Hotmail, AOL, Thunderbird, Apple. While it does the same with your calendars, we will discuss the calendar part of Plaxo in our Time/Schedule Management section. Like any other Contact management tool, plaxo also keeps track of when Birthdays of your contacts are. And you can set up your own reminders for them. Outlook - If used properly/perfectly, Microsoft Outlook itself would stand out as one of the best Contact Management solution. And it is only 'one of the' because, it doesn't allow you to synchronize over the web nor does it remind you about upcoming events multiple times. Yeah, you can set the reminder but you cannot say remind me a day before and also 30 min before the event. |