A friend, Tracey, received this question from one of her readers and so she asked me for some ideas.
I am starting a new telephone book. I find that as I add more names to my list it gets more difficult to find them because they have not been entered in alphabetical order. What are some effective ways to create one's own telephone index that can be added to as new names come up?
Now remember that I'm a paper gal so this is what I said:
Microsoft Outlook is of course the easiest option. It is easy to update, delete AND you can print out the pages if you want a hard copy. I use this for all my business stuff - clients, prospects and contacts (that's another blog post all on its own).
For a paper-based system, this is what I suggest.
1. You can write in pencil only. I did this for a couple of years but I didn’t use a normal pencil – I used the pink, purple and blue lead from Pentel – just so my address book would still look pretty :-)
And then I could categorise (now I’m doing the happy dance) with a different colour for each set – purple for church people, pink for friends and blue for family.
2. For the main telephone book that lives on my entrance hall table, what I personally do is write my real friends (people you’ve been friends with forever) and family in pen and any new ones in pencil for now, so you can erase if you don’t need the numbers any more OR you can just put a sticker over those ones. I don't like the stickers though.
3. For the yearly telephone pages in my daily planner, I use pen for the permanent names and post-it notes if it’s only going to be for a couple of months . So to give you an example, my gynae would be in pen but the lady I was arranging my new carport with is on a post-it note. (I just looked in my planner now for examples).
4. If they've allowed three pages for a section (let's say J-L), then I use one page for J, one for K and one for L. So at least the names under each letter are together.
This is what works for me.
What kind of system do you use?
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