Bringing Order to your Contacts

You have lots of great options when you finally upgrade that address book you've had since college. Paper-based planners, contact management software, personal digital assistants (PDAs) and smart mobile phones can all help you get your contact information in order.

Everyone's Little Black Book needs some order.

Decide if you're an ink-and-paper person or if you like to deal in digital.
Use only one address book. Don't keep separate books for home, work and other activities; instead, keep all the information in a single address book that's broken into categories.
Collect all your addresses before entering them. Don't forget club rosters, alumni address books, community resources, doctors and professional associations, in addition to your personal address book. Check that addresses are current and correct, and update those that aren't.
Keep track of birthday and holiday cards - whom you sent them to, and who sent them to you - in your book, and file reminders in your tickler system.

EQUIPMENT	FEATURES
Paper Organizers	Classic printed organizers, such as Filofax and Franklin Covey, are fast and flexible, but they can be bulky and heavy. Write names in ink, but addresses and telephone numbers in pencil. Make sure your organizer can accommodate new pages when the address book gets full. You may need to buy them from the organizer's manufacturer.
Contact Management Software	This software is aimed at salespeople, but it can be helpful for busy households, too. Choose a product that can share addresses with your computer's email program. Microsoft Outlook and Plaxo.com are some examples. Look for software that will synchronize with your mobile phone or PDA Use the program's mail merge feature to personalize a form letter. You can even send personalized bulk email. (Won't your friends love that?)
Personal Digital Assistants (PDAs)	Small, lightweight and powerful, even an inexpensive PDA will beat a paper organizer in terms of features - but some find learning to write on a PDA a difficult obstacle. Enter your information on your computer and then synchronize, rather than scratching all the information on the PDA's tiny screen. there's no sense in making this task more tedious than it has to be. Tap into the other features that come with your PDA. For example, you can add a birthday to a person's address record, and then have that birthday appear on your electronic calendar (with a reminder a week beforehand). Use the security feature on your PDA so that a password is required to access important addresses and phone numbers.
Mobile Phones	Break out that user manual. Many newer phones have full address-book capabilities - not just numbers, but addresses and even birthday reminders. Look into wireless data services, such as AOL MyMobile, MSN Mobile and Yahoo Mobile, that you can access via your mobile phone. They include address-book functions. Find out if your phone service can support these.