Ok. The Disney kick is over. I hope you enjoyed those. Disney fascinates me.

If you use Outlook for email and contacts, here is a good one for you. Do you have a system for storing contacts in Outlook? Most people don’t. Several problems arise with how we save a contact. Most of these won’t be apparent. Here’s the problem.

When you get a correspondence from a new contact, if you’re like me, you probably view it on your phone. Perhaps then you click on the email address and save as a new contact. This is great IF you only have ONE email account and ONE contact database. If you only have one of each, the contact goes into the lone contact database and life is good. Or is it? Do you get your personal email and your work email of the same account? If you do, that should be an item up for discussion – do you want emails from your bank, a member, the club president and your mother in law all coming to the same place? Probably not -I don’t. You can’t turn off one source or the other if they all go through one account (at least not easily). With multiple accounts, you can adjust when you get notified. We talked about this last fall. What does this have to do with contacts?

Plenty. Your contact databases are tied to your email accounts. If you have ONE email and ONE contact database, all contacts go into the same contacts file. All lumped together. This is not great. If YOU have multiple email addresses, your phone will create a contact database for each account by default. If you use an iPhone, the contacts will get saved typically in the contact database you last used. This means unless you are careful, many of your work contacts will be saved in your personal contact database and vice-versa. Easy to find on your phone because if you go to contacts and have all displayed, you type a name and it comes up – the database doesn’t matter.

To your laptop, however, it DOES matter. You you save a contact on your phone and it saves it to your personal Gmail account, guess where that contact won’t show? You guessed it!! On your contact database on your laptop. This is a problem. Why? Your first inclination is to recreate a new contact on your laptop, right? Aside from the extra work, now you have two of the same on your phone. So? you ask. These can track interactions you’ve had with someone. Potentially important…

To correct this, I only store WORK contacts from my laptop. I will respond to an email from a mew contact, then I follow up with a flag on the email. I can sort my email by flags. I take the contact information and drag it into contacts to create a new contact. Now ALL of my work contacts are in the correct database on BOTH my phone and my laptop.

Next week, we can chat about personal contacts, and how to store them, how to move a contact from one database to another on your phone, and how to use Categories. Fun stuff. NOT!! But it is important.

Your work, your way.

Happy Professionalism. Enjoy your work/ life balance.