New Year's Resolution No. 3: Contacts and Calendar

If you've hung in there with me you've already cleaned up your files, photos, and programs. You've also tuned up your PC. Don't you feel better about yourself already?

Now here's an interesting task: Clean up your email and contact list. A report I just read says that in an average year, a user will send and receive more than 23,000 emails and generate a minimum 1.1GB of email storage. To make matters worse, 24 percent of these emails will contain attachments.

It's fairly straightforward to remove your old email and store it in an archived file. I'll use Outlook in this discussion, but you can apply similar procedures to whatever tools you use.

Mail Cleanup

In Outlook, you'll rely on the Mail Cleanup tool and the AutoArchive tool, both found under the Tools menu. The cleanup will tell you how big your mail file is and let you search for all files older than a specified date. You can delete the ones you don't need, sending them to the recycle bin. To delete permanently, you'll need to empty the recycle bin. You'll find it on the same Mailbox Cleanup screen (pictured here).

Next, you can then choose the AutoArchive function to remove them from your inbox and put them in a separate archived inbox. People who are really on top of it do this by month, but since my projects seem to drag on forever, I do a mailbox cleanup by year, creating an archive and starting anew any moment now. If you want advice from someone who's much better at this than I could ever hope to be, check out Merlin Mann's program to get your inbox down to zero and keep it there.

Contact Cleanup

The bigger problem is contacts in your database. I've got about 5,000 contacts in my Outlook contacts. I'm sure that at least a quarter of them are no longer valid. They've moved, married, changed jobs, got a new phone, etc. As a matter of fact, I call my contact list a one-way street. People come into it, but they never leave.

The only way I know of cleaning out my contact list is to do it manually, going through each address, one by one. There are a number of online contact management systems like Plaxo. You tell Plaxo where you store your contacts, calendar, and other personal information, and it syncs it all together. It then lets other people update their own information, usually by sending them an email asking them for address changes. Recently the company created a mashup that will take information from Plaxo and integrate it with Microsoft Outlook. I've never liked the idea of sending automated mail from a service to my contact list, so I stay clear of Plaxo.

If you're an Outlook user, here are some tips for managing contacts as you head into the new year.

Turn on duplicate detection. You'll find it under Tools > Options. This Outlook feature will notify you when you're re-entering a contact and ask you whether you want to delete the old one.

Use contact categories. Get in the habit of categorizing your Outlook contacts (family, company, sports team, doctors, etc.). You'll have an easier time keeping things up to date. You can search on specific categories like "holiday mailing list."

Create multiple address books. Outlook stores all of your contacts in one big messy folder, but you don't need to do that. Add folders to separate family, friends, colleagues, or special projects, for example. To create a new folder, select File > New Folder and add a new Contact Item.

Get in the habit of using the Notes field in your contact listing as a tickler to tell you when you met the person or what they do.

Use distribution lists. If you're working on a project or have a team that you're in constant contact with, create a distribution list. For example, I store my Yahoo! team coworkers in a distribution list named Yahoo! Tech. When I select Yahoo! Tech as the contact, the entire list receives my email.