Contact Management – Arrrggghh!

OK, I’m finally doing it this week.

Recently, I bought an iPhone in order to try to consolidate cell phone, calendar, contacts, music, and whatever into one device. It’s a very cool machine…but I’ve been putting off one very painful task.

I have contacts scattered through at least 3 main applications – my Yahoo mail program, a Palm pilot (and its contact program), and LinkedIn. Add a couple of years and a lot of changes/duplications/incomplete data, and you can imagine what I’ve got. It’s not contact management. It’s contact nightmare!

So…I’ve exported all of them, consolidated all the files into one common Excel format, and now am going through the mind-numbing task of sorting through nearly 3,000 entries. As of this writing, I’m just about to start the “E”s.

Then, when finished, I have to wipe out my Yahoo contact file, and import this new master in, hoping to heck that it all works. Finally, it will sync up with the iPhone, and voila! Nirvana achieved!

Maybe. Fingers crossed….