This is Steveer Robbins.

Welcome to the Get It Done Guys, quick and dirty tips to work less and do more.

Get It Done Guy listener Andrew writes in,

I'm very curious about how you manage your address book.

I've got way too many contacts now and it's becoming unmanageable,

not to mention trying to manage contacts across my personal

and work emails, LinkedIn, Facebook, etc. What do you use? Get It Done, Guy? Handling contacts used to be done

with a little black book, where we would inscribe the names and addresses and phone numbers of our

friends. We would add little code symbols to tell us who was nice or who was naughty or who was so desperate that they

would even go with me to the high school dance. The book would fill up and then we would copy it

into a new book by hand. We might even accidentally forget to copy certain entries. All my exes

may live in Texas but I wouldn't know because they didn't make the cut. The computer age put our little black book online,

so now we could search and we could print,

we could group our contacts and stuff like that,

and we could add names forever.

Never had to get rid of one.

Life was good.

Well, then networks appeared.

So now we could share contacts with our assistant,

our boyfriend, our girlfriend,

our spous equivalent, and or polyamorous family unit. Life was even better, except that sometimes we forgot that we had also just shared the notes that we had only intended for ourselves. Notes like,

Leslie is a total bore, so never ever schedule long meetings. Oops. Then the Palm Pilot appeared, and that let us synchronize our contacts between our desktop

...