How many times have you tried searching for a particular contact and getting frustrated with the process? Perhaps you might have even called or messaged the wrong person?
Now, we all know how messy our contact lists can be — the hassles we go through trying to get the right contact info. Especially for those of us with multiple email accounts and phones, it’s a nightmare trying to keep track of all our contacts.
All that trouble can be avoided if you understand how to seamlessly organize your contact list in an effective and efficient way. Remember your contacts are a part of your life. Circumstances will arise when you need them quickly, and you don’t want to waste time trying to find the right person.
For this reason, you need a well-organized contact list for easy access. Here are some tips to help you better organize your contact list:
Compact your contact list
This is one of the first places where everything can go wrong and why we typically have so much trouble sorting out our contact list. Many of us have our contacts scattered across multiple platforms and oftentimes we forget how we saved a particular contact. This can be quite disorientating when we need to access a certain contact and find different varieties.
That’s why it’s important to compact all our contacts, preferably in a single database. Rather than searching across all the platforms for “Jack the plumber”, we can have all contacts set up in one place. This way, it’s easy to figure out who and how to connect with the contact that you need.
Categorize your contact list
Categorizing your contact list is another sure way of keeping up and staying organized. Depending on the level of your relationship with each contact and how often you need to keep in touch, consider grouping them in order of importance and relevance.
For instance, you could have a category for acquaintances and another for close business partners or members of your professional network. This saves you the burden of mistaking one contact for another.
Take Notes
Taking notes helps you remember details about the contact and what you spoke about. This way you are able to recall the discussion you had during your meeting and what category to assign them in your contact list.
Additionally, the brain tends to remember key facts when notes are taken by hand. So consider leveraging technology to take detailed notes or seamlessly convert paper notes to digital copies for references.
Record the date since your last contact
Keeping records of dates since the last contact will help you keep tabs of when your next meeting will hold. This will help you know if you are on track with your professional networking sphere. Constantly keeping up with your contacts helps you maintain relationships and nurture leads.
Backup your contacts
We know how frustrating it is if we lose our mobile phones. In this instance, we often hear the victims complain and say “it’s not even losing the phone that hurts the most, it’s losing all my contacts”.
You can avoid such lamentations by simply backing up your contact list. Thankfully most mobile devices and social accounts allow you to backup your contacts online and access them from anywhere with any device.
Benefits of organizing your contact list
Here are some of the benefits you can enjoy from having an organized contact list:
- It’s time saving — Organizing your contact list means you get to access your contacts much quicker.
- Easier access — Aside from saving you time and energy, you can seamlessly access any contact within your list without hassle
- Reduced stress — The stress we go through on a daily basis should not be compounded with contact tracking issues. An organized contact list means one less thing to stress about.
- It’s efficient and effective — While hard work is all well and good, we live in a world where smart work takes the cake. We can achieve more with an organized contact list.
Conclusion
Maintaining an organized contact list is one of the hallmarks of being a true professional. Still, you don’t have to depend on manual methods to do so. For example, you and your professional network could always resort to using digital business cards.
This way, people can have all your contact details in a single location. Plus it’s so much easier to share around and you don’t even have to be in the same room. This makes organizing your contact list more streamlined and efficient.
Ready to get started? Contact us today to design the best digital business card for you.
