For the longest time, I kept the business cards of all my contacts neatly filed in a plastic business card holder. Then one day, I realized how inefficient the whole process is. There are some major drawbacks with using this method of information storage:
- Storing something that shouldn’t be stored: How many of the business cards we collect do we really need to keep? Do you really intend to develop a business relationship with every person in your card holder? When I went through my card holder that day, I realized that I had no idea who half of the people were or why I felt the need to keep their contact information.
- Information is poorly organized. Every time I stored a card, I usually inserted it into first empty ‘pouch’ I found. I’m sure you can get card holders that are sorted alphabetically but even that is pretty useless when you can’t remember the name of the person you’re trying to look up.
- Physical space. Those small cards take up space and that space will soon turn into clutter. When one card holder becomes full, we have no choice but to go out and purchase another. Soon, you end up with two or three card holders that will take hours to go through. There’s also risk of your precious rolodex being stolen.
- Management. Every once in a while you should go through your business cards to get rid of the unnecessary ones. The only problem is that it takes a lot of time to go through each card, take it out of the pouch, discard it, and then fill the empty pouch with a new card.
So what’s the solution? I say, use a program like Microsoft Access or its open source equivalent, Open Office Base to manage your contacts. If you’re not familiar with these programs, do a google search to find free tutorials and learn the bare essentials (creating tables and basic queries).
You can create different tables for different categories of contact information. Personally, I use two tables: Personal Contacts (friends & family) and Business Contacts.
I use the following column headings for my business contacts: Contact Person, Company Name, Position, E-mail, Address, Phone, Fax, Website, and Comments. The ‘comments’ column is where I add a phrase or tag to help me remember how I know the person (e.g. met at the ‘X’ event; specializes in financing).
I also make use of ‘queries’, which allow me to sort the information in the table based on criteria I specify. Lets say I want to look only at contacts who work in the field of real estate. I create a simple query and sort the information based on the tag ‘Real Estate’ (inputted the ‘Comment’ column).
Here’s what the ‘Real Estate’ query looks like in ‘design view’. When I run the query, it only gives me the records that have the tag “Real Estate” in them.
The beauty with using a database program to store all your contacts is that information can be very easily added, sorted, deleted, and manipulated to retrieve the information you need. It is faster, and much more efficient than using the old school method of a rolodex or business card holder.
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