The In-Box Stack of Stuff, First with Addresses

My In-box is wayyyyy over flowing so I’m just going to work through a little bit of it today.

The first item in the stack is to update my address ‘book’. Because it’s that time of year I have all the Christmas/Holiday cards and envelopes in a pile on my desk ready to sort through and update my address book.

One by one I go through them, it goes quick. In the ‘olden days’ I used to keep an address book and hand write the my Christmas card envelopes each year, not so much anymore. I used to be embarrased just to even consider creating address labels. Oh how times have changed. Now that labels are more acceptable, heck, just the fact you get a card these days as

opposed to a facebook post, instagram, or email who cares about making life easier with labels anymore? Soooo, my address book is a Word document set up for Avery Label #6240.

Now, you may not think that is the best way to organize addresses. You might be using a spreadsheet, a digital address book, or even keep a paper address book. Those all work, but now that I’ve been using this system for several years I will tell you…game changer. No importing, no merging of fields, no connecting of spreadsheets to forms. Just one and done. Stick with me here.

Here’s what I do. Once I’ve gone through my cards and entered or updated each of my contacts I PRINT a set of labels.

Now, in case you don’t know me very well I have a tendency to look for discounts whenever I can. Typically, the week or two before Christmas, cards go on-sale 20-30-40% off. If I see some that I like I will buy them for the next year. Sure, they go 50-75% off later but by then they are picked over.

Now here’s what I do. I take these labels and put them on the envelopes of those cards along with return address labels, bonus if you had received some freebies in the mail because you made a donation (direct marketers love you, you know what I’m talking about.) And viola! My cards are now 1/2 way to being mailed for the next year. Just a stamp and the greetings left to do. It’s been a game changer for me.

So what about phone numbers, email or @signs? Where do those go? Here’s the deal. We all pretty much have cell phones and computers. For me, I found the best solution here was to keep the email and phone numbers in the phone, which is connected to a Gmail account. I pretty much just keep the phone and email addresses of my contacts with Google. Once Google has that, trust me, it’s not going anywhere. You get a new phone, no problem, your contacts are updated. You get a new computer, no problem, your contacts are just a url away.

Now, hopefully software won’t change…xoxo

I’m going to clear some of this off now, have a great day!