It’s easy to grow your contact list should you choose to. In the age of social media, meeting new people is way easier than before. Knowing people nowadays is no longer limited to personal meetings in school, sports clubs, networking conferences, and the likes. As your network grows, it can be challenging to organize your contacts.
However, you may not see this as problematic until you need to find a recently added contact but unfortunately, you have forgotten his name. Scrolling down your directory may take some time just to find it.
You may also encounter several contacts with the same name but different persons. There is a chance of sending the wrong message. You’re lucky if the recipient simply ignored the message. The unfortunate part is if it made you look something downright negative.
Here are some tips to avoid such scenarios:
Centralize Your Directory
Just like you want all your books in your library and all your clothes in the closet, getting all your contacts in one central place helps a lot in keeping things in order. For starters, you don’t have to frantically search anyone’s contact details from dozens of messaging apps.
There is another benefit of a centralized directory. In marketing, it prevents redundancy in sending promotional emails. It is counterproductive when two of your salesperson got the same customer email address. If they both send the same email, the potential client might see this as unprofessional.
You can do this through Shared Contacts for Gmail®. This app integrates with hundreds of messaging apps, including CRMs. This contact manager enables you to put all your connections in a central place to organize your contacts. In turn, your contact database will appear in autocomplete on the recipient’s field from all of your gadgets- your Android phone, your desktop, your IP phone, and even your iOS devices.
Create Contact Labels
Speaking of library, you should also arrange your contacts according to their ‘genre’. In this case, we can call it labels or groups.
Separate personal contacts and business contacts. You can further subdivide personal contacts into family and relatives, friends, acquaintances, etc. You may even opt according to where you met them. Business contacts can be classified as suppliers, co-workers, customers, leads, and so on.
It is advisable to tag the labels as you add the contact so it would not accumulate. Doing so saves you as well from sending the wrong messaRose’ from accounting which is really meant for ‘Rose’ your landlord.
Declutter to Organize Your Contacts
The common instinct for decluttering is to delete contacts you no longer find useful. Some may be from the previous company that you do only official transactions with. Others are your old schoolmates with whom you no longer foster friendship.
However, it is easier to say than to do so. There is always that “maybe” you’ll need him in the future. It may also be awkward that you have deleted a contact then he messaged you with some surprising information and a “who is this?” will ruin the momentum.
The solution is to put those contacts in a group and label it “Archives” or whatever name you deem fit. In that way, you would no longer see their name when you casually scroll through your contacts to see who else needs to be sent a holiday greeting or invited to your wedding.
Google Contacts also have the option to hide contacts without deleting them. This would be similar to how you ideally organize your desk wherein the most used things are at the top and the least used things are stored in the drawer below. In this case, the regular contacts are on your contact list and the least used are stowed away in the “Other Contacts” file. No worries though, the contacts in that folder still appear in autocomplete on the recipient field.
Merge Duplicates
It’s not uncommon that you have duplicate entries. For example, you have two ‘Romy Feller’ entries because one is her phone number and the other is her email address.
Moreover, when a customer messaged you from two different channels, e.g. one through WhatsApp and the other through regular SMS, you might have saved his number twice. Responding to both messages wastes time and effort. It would be practical to respond only once while acknowledging you have received both messages.
As you merge your contacts, you save memory space at least. If you have merged a lot of contacts, you also save a few scrolls in browsing your contact database.
Share Your Contacts
You can have the contact number of everyone in your company without copy/pasting a single it in your address book. Choose the best contact-managing app that suits your company’s needs.
A shared contacts directory saves you a lot of time creating labels, decluttering, and merging. The labels like ‘marketing’, ‘engineering’, or ‘admin’ are already created and shared with you. No more repeated contacts because you no longer need to enter one. Moreover, you can easily archive those contacts if ever you’d leave that company.
Conclusion on How to Organize Your Contacts:
No matter how ‘messy’ the state of your current address book, it is never too late to organize your contacts. You can do the labeling for at least 5 minutes a day. At the end of the week, your hundreds of contacts are already sorted. On the contrary, it would be easier if you add the labels as soon as you save the contact. That would take only 5 seconds.
