Get Organized: Contact Managemen


In email, your contacts are one of the most valuable long-term assets you own. These are the people that support your work, drive your social life, and keep you human. If you're changing jobs or moving to a new email program, you will definitely want to bring those people along with you.

Many social networks, apps, and services let you connect directly to major webmail programs, as well Microsoft Exchange accounts, to automatically import all the people with whom you've communicated before. I think this is one of the most astounding uses of modern technology. Don't take it for granted. If you can stay connected to people in your network in more ways than one, then do. You never know when an Internet service or company will shut down, and if you connect to certain people in only one place, well, that's nearly as bad as not backing up your most important data!

Get Organized In this article, I'll share some tips and tricks for staying connected to your important contacts. Then I'll quickly list the how-to steps for exporting contact information from Gmail, Outlook for Windows, and Outlook for Mac, which you'll need for a number of reasons. In most of those procedures, you'll also have to decide whether you'll export to the CSV or vCard format, so I've included a short explainer on how they differ at the end of the article. One isn't "better" than the other, as they both have their own pros and cons.

Maintaining Contacts: Tips and Tricks
Personally, I don't spend a lot of time doing upkeep on my email contacts list. I pretty much let Google and Outlook just save the email addresses of my correspondents, and then I rely on other sites and services to stay connected, the major one being LinkedIn.

Online networks for professional connections. I abandoned business cards ages ago. When I meet someone who asks for a business card, I tell them I don't use them anymore and add, "Just send me a LinkedIn invitation." I do not connect with people I don't know on LinkedIn. There are a few exceptions, like when I connect with someone who is well known, or whom I've reached out to instead of the other way around. But I'd say 90 percent or more of my LinkedIn network contains people I've personally met.

I do include friends on LinkedIn as well, although I've never once used that site to find my friends for social reasons. From time to time, a friend might turn up in a search I do on LinkedIn when I'm trying to find out who in my networks works at Company X or is an expert on Topic Y.

One aspect of LinkedIn that I really appreciate is that it puts the onus on each person to keep his or her contact information and company affiliation up to date. It's not my job to update the address book for all my contacts. It's their job.

Similarly, you could use Facebook, Twitter, or another social network of your choice to maintain your contacts to the same degree. I prefer LinkedIn for business, however, in large part because people tend to fill in their company affiliations both past and present, which is usually an important piece of information that I need to know when looking for people I need to reach.

Bonus Tip: LinkedIn likes to help you find people you know by connecting directly to your email account, but you can also upload a CSV file to LinkedIn and have it help you match up with people you know that way, too. This tip is helpful if you have exported contact information from old jobs, or if your current employer's email service is not supported by LinkedIn.

EasilyDo app for adding new iOS Contacts entries. On my iPhone, I use an app called EasilyDo that essentially automates small tasks that I've assigned the app to complete. One of them is for EasilyDo to keep an eye on my business email account and, when it sees an incoming email from a new person, ask me whether it should add that person to my iOS address book. There's an EasilyDo Android app as well.


I use my iOS address book for personal contacts primarily, but I also keep some of my co-workers' details in there, in case I need to reach them quickly when I'm out of the office. I also like that EasilyDo doesn't just automatically add each new contact but always asks me first.

ifttt for other ways to migrate contacts. Using the website and iPhone app called ifttt (which stands for "if this, then that") you can create commands, such as "if I add a new entry in my iOS Contacts, then enter that same information into a Google Drive spreadsheet." And there are a number of other services supported, so you could do something similar with contact information from people you know from Facebook, email, and other places, too. Unlike EasilyDo, ifttt will always carry out the command when triggered--it doesn't ask you first whether it should complete the action. But you can turn on and off these commands at any time from the ifttt website or app. The ability to customize the commands is very good, and you don't need to know a lick of coding to make them work. It's very nearly all point-and-click ready.

Bonus tip: Search ifttt's list of public "recipes" (i.e., commands) for "contacts," and you'll be able to find and reuse commands other people have already developed. Note that most of the automations written in ifttt work going forward but don't necessarily migrate data you already have.