Updating contact templates ~ teknologi

Posted on Tue - December 22, 2009

Updating contact templates

The good kind of profiling

An add-on to a consulting gig forced me to rethink things a bit.

Palm Desktop for Mac was a pretty limited program and I got used to working around it. Many of the restrictions came from the Palm OS itself. Long term I know I will be switching to a iPod Touch, I'm waiting for one with a camera and voice recording capacity.

Anyway, Address Book in OS X has many more (and expandable) fields than PDM, and the note section can hold what's left. So I went back to my profile notes and the Mackay 66. I came up with a new set of questions to be answered as I use them, and I broke those questions into ten sections. Obviously I can't share the whole thing with you, about half is still the M66 and covered by copyright. I can show you the titles though.

OK, here's what you are looking at. The "& Portrait" is the Myers-Briggs personality types and definitions. The "& Style" is the quick and dirty Dawson personality styles. The "=profile" are my version of the profiles, which are the ones I drag to the note section of the Address Book card to answer. Obviously I don't have this information on all my contacts, profile10 only applies to people I've slept with

I start these with punctuation because OS X puts them at the top of the sorting list.

Just as an example, here's one of the profiles.

=profile3 - family

Marital status -
previous marriages -
Wedding anniversary -

Spouses name (if you have anything more than name for spouse, consider a separate entry for spouse) -
Spouses occupation -
Spouses education -
Spouses birthday -
Spouses interests/activities/affiliations -

Previous spouse info - matches spouse info (ONLY if contact maintains relationship with previous spouse)

Children, if any, names and ages (minor and living with contact, label "child" otherwise custom i.e. "son") (if you have anything more than name, consider a separate entry for that child) -
Have custody? -
Each child's education -
Each child's birthday -
Each child's interests - (hobbies, problems, etc) -

if person's parents are living and person maintains relationship, parent info matches spouse info.

If siblings are living and person maintains relationship, sibling info and sibling spouse info matches person's spouse info.

"1 off"
More than one degree of separation is usually not relevant. Parents yes, siblings yes, children yes, grandparents no, uncles and aunts no, grandchildren no. Judge by person's attitude and behavior.

As I get the information for the contact, I delete the questions and notes and just put the information. I end up with something that is fairly detailed but concise.

On this particular profile, each family member's info can be put in one of the people fields, which saves space in the note field.

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