Over the weekend I found myself at a cafe waiting for a friend. I probably only had 10-15 minutes to wait and decided I would leave the house with only one pen and a piece of 8 1/5 x 11 paper folded up in my back pocket (this is highly unlike me to have so little with me – what if I get trapped on a desert island?). I broke out the pen and paper and decided I’d figure out what this week held in store for me. Unconsciously I started with the folder hierarchies I had created for my “Work” folder. Once I realized this I divided the paper down the middle and wrote “Home” on the left. The “Work” side was amazingly efficient – I could actually think several sub-folders deep if I needed to, but the “Home” side wasn’t so clear. The home side was muddled because the top hierarchies were based on file type rather than subject, concept or category. I think I need to reorganize the Home folder, but not sure how at this point. I do think the Images and Audio should be in a sub-folder of Media or something like that.
I’m still surprised how clearly the work folders came to mind and how easy it was to remember if there was any pending business in any of the categories.
CONTACTS
The next item of organization I’m tackling is my contact list. I have a variety of contact lists, many web-based and a few incarnations of address book contacts. I’ve merged as many of them as I could find into one master address book and then set about the tedious task of correcting some, updating others, etc. This part isn’t complete but it is getting much better organized. Deleting contact info left and right. I’m taking a few more versions of contact lists home tonight and will be merging data to perhaps some old school techno? By the way, Apple’s Address Book is pretty handy with merging data from duplicate records, as well as importing and exporting lists of contacts. I was always confused as to how to view multiple contact lists that were saved as vCards, still am a little – but was able to export all (with a unique name, in my case the number of vcards in the list and the date) to my desktop and then delete all the cards from the application and import a different set of vCards (with .vcf extension).
Bcc:
Earlier today I sent out an e-mail to a bundle of contacts. I never knew exactly how to send an e-mail to multiple contacts so that they don’t see the other contacts’ information. It was quick to find but here’s the basics of it…send the e-mail “To:” yourself and insert all the people you want to send it to in the “Bcc:” field (which I now know stands for “blind carbon copy” – meaning the recipients can’t see anything about the other recipients). Right after I sent the e-mail I received several notices of the message being undeliverable to certain e-mail accounts, so blammo! they got deleted from my list. Maybe I should’ve thought that out a bit more before deleting them but whatever, most of them were old information.
John Trendler: Still Learning 