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Keeping track of people in my life?
UniAce | Mar 16 2006
Does anyone have any ideas on keeping track of the many people in my life, from central to peripheral, from friends to collaborators? I'm heading off to grad school next year to continue my training as a cognitive scientist. For the kinds of interdisciplinary research I'm interested in, it's very valuable to meet and converse with other researchers from many disciplines, and maintain those connections over the years. I've already accumulated a large list of wonderful people I've met in academic settings (classes, conferences, student groups), not to mention other settings. I'd really like to offload a list of people onto the computer, where it'll be saved more durably than in my brain. And I'd like to have tags or categories or notes too (e.g. "Joe Johnson, met him at X conference, he's at Y University, he does research on Z, and likes to skydive"). The social network websites (e.g. myspace, friendster) are inadequate because everyone has to be a member. Maybe a standard address book program might work? I'm on Mac OS X and the built in one allows for categories and such. Alternately, I was about to just start a braindump text file. But I wanted to see first if anyone knows of any better tools for this kind of task? Thanks 16 Comments
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 I use the notes field...Submitted by alanterra on July 9, 2006 - 5:34pm.
Berko wrote:
I use the notes field to keep track of the metadata for the person: where we met, who I know them through (for networking), interests, kids'/spouse's birthdays, anything else that might be important to remember. I've been reading 43folders on and off for a while, but when I found Berko's idea I knew that this was going to work for me. I spend a lot of time in databases, and it was so nice to have a simple solution for a problem without having to "roll my own." I wanted to add my own 2? on how to expand on Berko's idea. I keep my mailing lists (now) using smart groups in Address Book and certain constants. For instance, everyone I want to send an invitation to my photo show gets the string "kPhotoMail" in the Note field. I am enclosing (if I can do it successfully) 3 applescripts that help with this. You select one or more people in Address Book, and then you can add or remove a string from each person, which makes it easy to categorize people quickly into different smart groups. To add people to my mailing list, I just select a bunch of them and then use the script to add "kPhotoMail" to the note. To remove them, I use the script to remove the string. Two things to note: (1) Running the script from within Address Book is slow if you have hundreds of contacts selected, to speed it up, run the script from Script Editor, (2) You'll need to install MacPackToolbox Have fun! PS--I am adding a fourth script which just looks at the country field and adds a script "kCountry=Mexico" (or whatever), which allows you to work around an insufficiency in Address Book which doesn't allow smart groups to differentiate according to the country. » POSTED IN:
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