August 2009

I have a many frustrations with our modern era (I’m still struggling with organizing my digital photos) and top of the list is keeping track of contact information.  Home addresses, work addresses, personal emails, work emails, cell phones, iphones, home phones, work direct lines vs work blackberries, blogs, tumblrs, flickrs, the address of that friend’s baby photos on smugmug.   How to handle this ever changing and important data?

My blackberry address book used to corral cellphones and work phones plus some email addresses but I was always too lazy to save that info to the actual SIM card and so I’ve lost all contact info three times in the last year (don’t do dishes and talk on your blackberry at the same time is all I can offer you).  I’ve never been one to have a “hard” address book, as I have terrible handwriting that never conforms to the tiny space allotted, and I never can keep the actual address book caught up with all the changes to various contacts.

I had a decent contact list in Outlook in my last job (mostly thanks to a great assistant) but, when I left, I stopped using Outlook and never took the time to dig the file out and convert it and, really, what would I have converted it to?  I had a decent Excel spreadsheet of mailing addresses from our wedding, which most recently was used/updated when sending out our baby announcements, but it too is woefully static and doesn’t have any indication of email addresses. Don’t talk to me about those awful services that ping people you know every six months to see it they’ve moved, I hate them. And, I don’t really use bookmarks in Firefox because it is so much work to organize them.  (I’m pretty time starved these days).

As a partial solution, or a stop-gap measure, in the last couple of months I’ve been slowly adding people to my Google contacts whenever an email yields something relevant: new emails, new phones, new addresses, new babies, new girlfriends (I’m bad with names).  There is a great “notes” section in Google Contacts for those little things like a friend’s favorite color, favorite flower, or your father-in-laws shirt size.  This information always seem to show up in emails and then you have no place to store those relevant details (in addition to bad handwriting, I’ve got a shitty memory too).  Recently I’ve been yearning for contacts in a form that can’t crash or be erased and would be more portable (I can’t access my Google Contacts from my blackberry). But how to merge all this great electronic information with a more material form?

Today, I cracked the code. My ah-ha moment? Realizing I could download my Google contacts, print them out on mailing labels and paste them into this sweetly chic address book.  Handwriting problem solved, updating problem solved (I can always just print out a new labels once a year and paste it in) and my electronic crashing problem solved (gmail accounts can get hacked, you know).  How do you keep track of this stuff?  Do you even try? Is it a losing battle?

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