How to create contact lists
Hey Peeps! 👋🏼
If you’re just getting to know me, a quick heads up: I’m a sucker for productivity.
You know, those little adjustments you make to your routine tasks and that at scale make a significant difference in your life. Contact lists are one of those little adjustments.
Today I want to write about optimising the process of booking company meetings in both time and accuracy.
If you’ve never had an issue before March 2020, I’m sure you ran into some problems after the pandemic started.
For me, the most critical and error-prone team meetings were the ones with 15+ people.
Every single time I booked a meeting with that many people, even if they were recurrent, I always had to stop, review the list, think of who I was missing, and eventually successfully achieve this apparently simple task.
After a while, I started doing a quick little trick I found extremely useful that, at the end of the day, made booking these meetings extremely straightforward.
I’ve started isolating my contact lists by their team, then I moved by specific contexts that made sense given the meetings I was creating.
Note that you need to remember to add and remove people as they enter and leave the company/team/context.
Once I had to hold a meeting, in the guest list, all I had to do was to add the contact list name and all of the members of the list were added to the meeting.
This extremely small trick made a huge difference in my weekly planning as it reduced the time I spent booking meetings with a heavy list of attendees to close to instant.
I’m going to focus on Google Workspace, previously known as Google Suite, for no other reason than it’s what I’m currently using for all my activities. I have absolute confidence that other tools, like Microsoft Outlook, will have similar approaches.
Below is an example of how to create google contact lists:
- Go to https://contacts.google.com
- Ensure that you are connected with the correct account — check the top right corner
- Start by creating a label by clicking on the left menu and select “+ Create Label”
- Add the name you want for your list
- Now let’s search for a contact and add it to the list.
- On the top middle bar search for a contact name and click on the name once you find it
- Once a modal opens, click the 3 dots placed in the top right corner (should be the third icon) to show more options
- In the subsection “Change Labels” select the labels you want to add that to that contact.
- Go to https://calendar.google.com
- Click on the top left corner and click on “Create”
- On the guest list add the name of the label you’ve just created.
- A popup should show up with the label’s name. Click on it.
- All the contacts that have the label assigned should now be added as guests to the meeting.
Originally published at https://aleadersmindset.com on October 2, 2021.
