When you receive phone calls from potential clients and other business contacts, so how do you organize the list of names and phone numbers you get? Do you use a notebook exclusively for jotting their contact information along with some details about what you discussed?



What are the best ways to manage these calls? Most folks I’ve talked to get calls while driving, and they grab the nearest piece of paper to write down the info. If you do this several times a day, pretty soon, you will find yourself with several pieces of paper with names, phone numbers, and notes on them. Some of these notes are unreadable since they were scribbled too quickly and you waste more time making sense of the markings.

What are your tips for keeping the mass of data together and orderly? We all need to find better and more efficient methods of organizing the phone calls since it increases our productivity and results.

There are a good number of strategies you can use to make your communications more manageable, try them out and see which works best for you. An obvious method is to get a single notebook or tablet and to carry it with you wherever you go. When you get these calls, you can write it down and keep it all in one easy to remember location. The important thing is to remain consistent in how you are documenting the calls. Make some standard fields that you would fill out each time, such as name, phone number, date/time of contact, description of what was discussed. You don’t want to be in a position where you have wonderful notes, but you forgot to jot down the contact’s phone number.

In handling the calls, you can save yourself much headache by making sure that once you complete your call, program your phone with the name and some clue about who the caller is associated with. So if you get a call from an insurance agent, you can program in Insur - John White – Allstate. Get into the habit of doing this automatically and immediately. If you use some voicemail or phone call ID capture program, you will have the additional ability to capture caller information and forward them to your computer. If the caller leaves a message, it also goes to your computer. These automated programs can ensure that all calls coming to you are kept and do not get lost.

The numerous tools that technology has to offer come in the form of devices such as a palm pilot, a Blackberry, or an iPhone to enter all the info, dates, phone messages, and appointments. In case you’re not familiar with it, these items are small electronic devices just a bit wider than a cell phone that allows you to make and receive phone calls, access the internet, store data, take pictures, and complete a variety of other useful tasks. You can get the technology for about $150-300 plus a monthly subscription for cell phone use and it not only records, but also effortlessly saves the data for you. When you arrive home at the end of the day, you can synchronize the information with your computer. This creates a backup of the data so you don't have to worry about losing data if someday the thing dies on you. The wave of the future is in mobility of communications, so sooner or later, these devices will become commonplace.