One of the problems of being technologically advanced is keeping up with all the information that is thrown at us. We store information in different places, and suddenly, we don’t know which is the most up to date. In order to minimize confusion, in GTD terms, we need to limit our in boxes.
When I first limited my email accounts, I closed out many and consolidated others. That brought me down to a minimum, but all the accounts had the possibility of storing email addresses. And if I updated one, I wasn’t necessarily going to update the rest. And goodness knows there isn’t any auto-magic cross-program synchronization to get it all together.
I tackled the problem and decided that I needed to look at email even closer, and have ONE email address in box. This in box would be where everything was kept, and would be pushed out to my various other needs as necessary.
Where’s the Source?
I decided that my PDA would be the master keeper of email information, and it would be pushed out to the other places as needed. This was mainly because I always have my PDA with me, and I can look up information if necessary. Having the PDA always at hand meant that I could do all updates there, and not worry about losing changes in other applications.
Getting The Information Out
One would think that deciding on the PDA would be the end of it. However, I really like having email addresses in my email programs so that I’m not always re-looking up addresses. GMail does this automatically. However, my main email program at home, Eudora, does not.
The solution came from realizing I could export from the Palm desktop to CSV. And once in CSV, there are many places it can go. With a bit of programming in Excel, I was able to set up a macro to push the CSV addresses out into the file format Eudora expected. The 30 second action is part of my weekly maintenance.
Have you brought yourself down to one “in box” for email addresses? Think about how you could do it, and the trouble you would save yourself.
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2 comments ↓
Wow, someone else who still uses Palm Desktop and Eudora.
While I use Eudora for my work e-mail, I use GMail for my personal e-mail. I wish I had a way of sync’ing Palm Desktop to the GMail Contacts, as anemic as it is.
Rather than trying to keep the Eudora address book in sync with Palm Desktop, I usually just start the e-mail from Palm Desktop by right clicking on the contact and selecting “e-mail”. It also seems that Eudora manages to remember people I have sent mail to before, as when I begin to type their name/address, Eudora will generally do an auto-complete. Based on this and Palm Desktop, I haven’t bothered to try and maintain a Eudora address book.
I guess my real central repository for e-mail addresses is Palm Desktop. Even if I enter an address into my Treo, it gets synched back to Palm Desktop - that is where I really want it.
@GregC:
Yes, I’m in with the dinosaurs. But I figure it’s working, so I won’t mess with it. I tried to install Thunderbird about a year ago, and thank goodness I ghosted right before, because it trashed my hard drive. Lesson learned: stick with the tried and true.
I use GMail quite a bit too…the only things that come into my Eudora are things I really have to process at home.
As far as the sync between Palm desktop and Gmail contacts, I tried out CompanionLink. Since I’m not sure of the value I would get from this, I balked at the price, but it did work very well during the trial. Perhaps that might be a solution for you?
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