Hello everyone, this is Helen Huang @ Organizing, based in Beijing, China. In order to better learn and practice the YiXiaoNeng Time Management System, after finished publishing 100 Chinese articles, I decided to continue writing and publishing a daily English article in another 100 days based on the "YeWuBin Time Management 100 Episodes" audio program. Today is the 176th day.

Today's topic is: The Eight Skills for Managing Contacts

Dale Carnegie, an expert in human interaction and self-development once said that a person's success is 15% ability but 85% interpersonal relationships. So which do you think is more important? Interpersonal relationships.

First, we need to determine our special skill or advantage that we can provide, and then we need to build and hone that specialty.

We also need to effectively maintain relationships. First, we do need to maintain strong connections, because they allow us to have emotional connections with others which are critical to mental health. The weak connection which is the more transactional and value exchanging interaction with others is also very important, because weak connections can not only provide information and valuable messages, but more importantly they are the necessary first steps to building weak connections - a strong connection with success. Only a weak connection can eventually become a strong connection.

Today I want to share with you eight tools you can use to manage your contacts productively. There are many tools that you can use and they are all getting better and better each year. Which should you use? Over the ten years I have been studying time management, I have tried hundreds of tools and I have found what I consider to be the best of these.

Today, I will share with you what I have found to be most valuable and therefore what I use most frequently. So without further ado, here are 8 skills for managing your contacts.

The first skill is to organize your contacts.

Everyone has hundreds of contacts in their cell phones, but do you have those same contacts in your iPad and computer? What we need is a way to synchronize all of those contacts together. I choose and recommend the iPhone, because the iPhone can synchronize information across multipul devices. I can either add the cell phone number into my iPhone contact list, or e-mail the contact to my cellphone, or I can just input the contact to my computer or iPad. Because I have an iPhone set up properly, my information will auto-synchronize across all three devices. All automatically. This is important because it means all of my information will be up to date no matter which device I'm using. 

The second skill is collecting business cards info electronically.

We often collect business cards from people we meet in all kinds of occasions. Instead of collecting cards manually where it could be easily lost, we can store these business cards electronically using an App called CamCard to store and manage them. CamCard reads the information from the business card after you take a picture of it using your phones built in camera. It then translates the contact information and stores it electronically. CamCard has a function that allows you to group and organize your contacts as well. We can put all of our business cards into CamCard, and you can then share that information with others instantaneously. CamCard also has a secret function. We can take several business cards in one picture, and it will collect and store the information from all of them at once. You can then send a quick email to all of the cards you just collected.

The third skill is dividing your contacts into groups.

I used to have an App called "Power Contact" to group my contacts into meaningful groups.  What unfortunately it does appear that this app is no longer available, so you should look for another alternative applications. In short, you must be able to divide your contacts into groups, such as classmates, neighbors, high-ranking people, those you often contact, those you seldom contact and so on. Only divide these contacts into groups that have value to you. They must mean something to you.

Each day we do a lot of things. We go to lots of different places, and therefore we meet many new people each day. If you learn the Yixiaoneng method well, you will know we not only need to collect but also organize and then prioritize information. This allows us to focus on what's important first. We prioritize and sort the information that we get.

The fourth skill for managing contacts is to use some of the social networks available to us including Microblog and WeChat in China and Facebook or others around the world.

WeChat is more helpful for establishing a social network system. Nevertheless, the more often we interact with people, the easier it is for our group of online friends and contacts to become disorganized. So from time to time we need to clean up our contact lists.

What I do is frequently renew and delete WeChat contacts frequently. Every few months, I review all the names of friends in my WeChat list. I try to remove contacts that I don't speak to frequently. And here's the important part – I make sure I attach a note to each of my contacts – a note that will help me remember something about them. You should do the same.

For example, I had a student who participated in my 99th Yixiaoneng offline course. Therefore I like to call him my G99 man. As I learned more about him, such as where he comes from, if he has other classes in common with me, or if he has the dream of travelling around the world. I learned all of these things. I made a new note every time I learned it. Attaching a note describing your contact will make it much more memorable for you and provide some topics to start talking point when you meet, and thus reduces the anxiety that you have before facing them.

WeChat also has a label function, shall not really use that often, but I have heard that it could be valuable for others. I had positive feedback about it. The reason why I don't use it is because clicking on the label often takes a lot of time. However, seeing a person's name and the label will make it much easier to learn about people and the connection between them and us.

By using these social networks, such as WeChat and others, we can exchange networks very quickly and we can reply quickly. Since we have so many contacts because it's difficult to remember everything about everybody, these labels and notes will help us tremendously. These tidbits allow us to have quick interactions and dialogue.

We also need to take the time to delete contacts we don't interact with. Either delete them or just begin talking to them. Either delete or interact, otherwise, it is not meaningful to save these contacts, and it just takes up space.

The fifth skill for managing contacts is constantly deleting and trimming contacts that you don't interact with.

In our contact management systems, such as CamCard, WeChat, and other social software platforms, we gather many contacts and so a great deal of data is collected. As a Yixiaoneng time management practitioner, you need to keep those contacts organized. So, how can you trim these contacts? Well, this is what you should do.

First, delete unimportant people that you never contact. If you didn't contact them within the last year or two, delete them. Put contacts you don't interact with now, but you feel you may need to in the future into a location called "future possibility" so they're organized. Next, create a group for people you contact frequently, and put that into its own frequent.

Remember, it's not the quantity of contacts. That's important it's the quality of those contacts and how you use them. So remember to delete, delete, delete, then tidy, tidy, tidy. Synchronize your contacts across devices and group them in like groups. Grouping allows us to find the appropriate contacts efficiently.

The sixth skill is to cultivate the habit of non-real-time contact.

So what is non-real time contact? Well to understand this, you should first know that a real-time contact will cause a delay for both you and your contact. Real-time contact is when you actually meet someone fact to face, or whether you made them virtually.

For example, on WeChat, many people email me. If I respond to those emails immediately, then I will be overwhelmed with responses as it will take time. If you listened to some of the early lessons in this series, you learned about the Pomodoro technique. Focus on the more important things first. You won't die if you don't check your WeChat, so you need to cultivate non-real-time habits for communication.

I often tell my students that I will reply to your message, but I may not reply right away. Perhaps in one day, I will. Over time you will see just how valuable this Pomodoro technique is.

The seventh skill is you should interact with more people by taking advantage of meetings or concentrated salons or meeting teams.

The eighth skill is in the process of developing interpersonal relationship, be sure you are creating value for others. That is the key.

That's all sharing today. Thank you being with me together. Have a wonderful day!