Turbocharge your contact software ~ teknologi

Posted on Thu - May 11, 2006

Turbocharge your contact software

I've got a minor case of Asperger's Syndrome. It's not a big deal, but it does mean I tend to obsess easily and unless I really pay attention, I forget the social niceties and the things that are important to other people. So, I developed ways to compensate, and that started with my Rolodex and Daytimer. These days I use a Palm, but the ideas remain the same. With a little bit of effort and discipline, you can make yourself look good by keeping information at your fingertips.

A lot of this is specific to the Palm OS4 and to the Palm Desktop for Macintosh. I will be using a Palm and migrating over to Address Book, iCal, and The Missing Sync, but it hasn't happened yet. Ideally everything in a PDA would be one huge relational database, but that hasn't happened yet. So working within the limits, this is what I have come up with.

Start by making some ground rules and sticking to them, it makes updates much easier.

Get used to working with primary and secondary categories, Only one will transfer to your Palm, that is usually the drop down on the left. I usually use punctuation signs to start my primary categories, that lets me see at a glance if something is up. *Friends/Family is a primary category, Close Family is a secondary.

Palm Desktop for Mac (PDM) lets you choose how many extra fields on each contact, 7, 9, or 11. ONLY the first seven will be transfered to your Palm. That's very important to keep in mind. I use 11 myself, but that is because I can be obsessed with details.

PDM allows for two addresses, which the software calls Primary (left hand) and Secondary. On the Palm itself, the Primary address will be part of the record, while the Secondary address is in a note attached to the address. You can call them whatever you want, but I suggest that for people you use the Primary address for Work (or business if it's a company) and the Secondary address for Home. Both will show up in your Palm, but you know that anything with only a Secondary is usually going to be a home address.

So with all that in mind, let's look at what my preferences are for Palm Desktop for Mac, with a few notes here and there.

General
Show Instant Palm Desktop Menu
Give Warnings on Deletion(VERY IMPORTANT)
Date Format - Long
New To Do Priority - Medium
Private Records - Show

Addresses
Custom fields - 11
(make sure that Auto-capitalization and Add New Items to Menus are not selected)

Now, using all that, here is what a typical address book entry looks like.

Heres a picture of just the bottom box so you can get an idea of the fields I use. Now my Email 2 and Spouse/SO fields are the last ones that transfer to the Palm, everything below that stays on the Macintosh. Note that this way still lest me keep two web addresses and two email addresses for the contact on my Palm, Keep the comments BRIEF and to the point, they are stored in the same attached memo that has the Secondary address.

For more in depth contact information, I use BrainForest combined with a template of my own. Part of the template is based on copyrighted information so I can't give it to you here, but I have a way around that. See, I also keep contact information on books that I recommend to people, and you can find one of the sources here.

Same idea, just adapted a bit for books. This particular book provides the Mackay 66, which was the starting place for my own contact templates. Let's look at the differences. Over in the phone box I've put in the book title and the ISBN number. You can't use punctuation in this field for the book title. This makes searching easier.

I've included the book title in the title field under author, but I also have that ZZBook thing in company name. Title isn't searchable on the Palm, company name is, but you don't want a bunch of book titles interfering when you sort by company in Palm Desktop for Macintosh.

On books I always use the comment box to store a web-ready HTML link in case I want to send it on a post I make. I always use the authors web site (if they have one) in the first website field and the Amazon link in the second.

Obviously this can lead to an author having more than one contact entry. After the second book I usually start a regular contact entry for them as well.

I use a similar idea for web articles I use, and of course for personal web graphics.

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