Address Book 101

A fairly obvious point, most businesses and indeed most individuals, should keep an address book. Well, the simple fact is that most of them (businesses) and us (individuals) do. The catch: you, like me, may have several address books. You write someone's address down in one, and, completely randomly, then write someone else's address down in the other one.

The problem is that you know you have their address but you have no idea where it is. Is it in the black leather bound address book you got for your birthday or the artsy one your mom sent three Christmases ago?

If any of this sounds even vaguely familiar as a rendition of how you personally organize your address book, and particularly if you are running or involved in running a business of any shape or form, you need an integrated address book, preferably on your computer.

I might be one of the first people to mourn the decline of handwriting. I have a beautiful fountain pen that really doesn't get much of a work out from day to day. Sad but true. However, particularly when it comes to time management tasks like address keeping, you actually have to do some "keeping".

First of all, keep your addresses in the same place. Have one address book. Ideally, you should use a program like the standard address book that you have as part and parcel of the Microsoft Windows program. You can enter all of your addresses and organize them by categories. If you have a business and the address book is essentially being used for that, it's even more important to have the information integrated in to one format, one address book, and updated regularly.

Most address book programs have fancy features that are surprisingly useful. Some programs have card displays and let you label all of the information you want to keep about a particular person, no matter how many phone numbers and email addresses your friend might have. Another great thing is the notes space features. Most address book programs let you jot down a couple of pointers to yourself about each contact. For a business client, for example, you could make a record of their preferred method of contact, whether it's e-mail or phone; whether they like you to call their secretary four days before a meeting to confirm.

As you start to implement more time management principles, you will probably start to love features on the slightly more advanced address book programs, such as labeling and grouping tools that let you organize contacts with even more precision. For example, if you have a bunch of kids and they in turn have a bunch of friends, you can organize names and addresses and contact information according to which friend belongs to which child. For your business address book, you can organize clients according to, say, their industry or purchasing habits. Regular clients, for example, can all be grouped together. One-time clients can be grouped together as well. You can then target sales lead generations and things like that to the right groups, giving your one-time client group rather more of a boost to see if you can make any more conversions.

One other great thing about keeping an address book on your computer is that you dramatically cut down on the time it takes to send holiday greetings, or any form of printed material (newsletters, invoices) to your clients. With practically every address book program you can quickly and easily transfer contact details to print onto an envelope. You can also quickly go to email programs and send emails to a single contact or even your entire mailing list (easily organized in your address book).

Keeping an Address Book Recap:

1. Use one address book...preferably a program on your computer

2. Put all contact information in one place...in the address book

3. Update your address book when you know someone's contact information has changed

4. Organize contacts into groups for ease of reference