Lord help us, we're spending the rest of March celebrating the seven desktop tools that are essential to managing paper in your office! I call these tools The Sorted Seven, and you can see an overview of the whole system here.
On Monday, we discussed what to do with date- and/or time-specific information (put it in your calendar). Today, we'll talk about what to do with contact information.
This information comes in a few different formats: info in an email, an address written on a Post-It while you're on the phone, a postcard, an empty envelope and, of course, a business card.
But, as usual, these pieces of paper and data have no meaning if you don't know where to look for the information they carry: Which specific email had that client's cell phone number? Where, in your amorphous business card pile, did you put that prospect's card? Did you throw out that envelope with the return address on it?
You know where I'm going with this. Contact management systems aren't remotely fascinating, sexy or even geeky-cool. But, when they're used properly, they're indispensable for any business.
This pic shows just a few of your options for contact management. If you own a Mac or use Microsoft Outlook, you've already got a pretty decent contact management system built in. Ditto if you use a Blackberry. Of course, having a free-ish electronic system doesn't mean you need to use it. If you're a paper person and are diligent about the updates, by all means, use a paper system.
As with calendar systems, use what works for you -- but use it, and use it consistently. If you're sorting through your In shelf and find contact info, you have two options. If you've got just one or two pieces of contact info to enter into your system and about 2 minutes to spare, take the time right then to update your contact management system.
If you don't have the time and/or you've got a lot of info to enter, sort the contact information into an Action File (we'll discuss these this coming Monday) and, if possible, block off a time on your calendar to enter that information. If you get a regular influx of business cards, consider a scanner (such as Neat Receipts, also available for Mac).
You might wonder why I singled out contact management as a separate part of the Sorted Seven. The reason is that no matter what business you're in, your business is about people, about connections, about relationships. So any tool that manages the info about those relationships is mission-critical to your business.
We're now more than halfway done with the Sorted Seven! Do you feel like you've learned some useful stuff in this series thus far? If you have any questions about any part of it, please let me know!
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