Organizing My Addresses for Postal Mail
October 20, 2009 by Mary Emma Allen
I often don’t get my postal mail sent out in a timely fashion because I don’t have addresses handy. I get the letters and cards written, often when I’m traveling, away from home, and in various spare moments. 
Then they will sit in my tote bag, on my desk, or my stationery box waiting to be addressed. I have some addresses in a file folders, others in an old address book, more in a schedule book I carry in my purse, others on business cards, and still more in my husband’s computer.
Why can’t I take the time and get them all together?
I don’t want them all stored on the computer or an electronic address book. My husband did that once in a handy dandy electronic gadget for this purpose. Then when the address gadget went “kaput,” we lost all the addresses.
So I must start little by little (possibly part of my 20 minutes per day of organization) and pull them together, along with phone numbers.
How do you organize your addresses for postal mailing.
I do create my list electronically (type it up in MS Word). But then (important step) I print it out right away after I finish entering the addresses and put the printout in my binder where I keep my passwords and account numbers other useful information. Then when I get new ones from time to time I will tape the buisiness cards and return address stickers with the addresses to the bottom of the last page. Periodically I go back and edit the document to add the new ones or fix any changes that had been penciled in on my current copy. And for when I’m really lazy, there’s an extra page with a sheet protector where I can drop in any new cards I haven’t had time to tape to a sheet of paper. Nice thing about having a printout or two is if your computer blows up you can scan and OCR your previous printout to recreate the electronic document.
But even if you don’t do them electronically typed, just making the one master place where you keep the addresses helps a lot! That way when you find addresses elsewhere little by little, you can relocate them to the master place.
Hello again! I am not sure what kind of phone you have, but if you have a Blackberry, iPhone, MyTouch, or anything of that sort then you can use a program called Evernote. I use that company in many different forms to keep track of all of my blog ideas, or ides for my ecommerce website. With this program you can use an application that you put directly onto your phone so you can take a picture of your business cards and send it to Evernote. I use all forms of Evernote, (for free) on my phone I have their application through PixlePipe, on my desktop I have a downloaded version, and I also use their online version as a back up so that if anything happens I will never loose my information! This can be messy to some, but you can set up notebooks so that all of your addresses go right into an address only notebook. Then you have access to your information anywhere you are! And personally I am not a huge fan of printing even more out than I already do, so it is even less paper to keep track of!
I keep my address information in an A5 size binder and use the filofax (or other diary product) pages to put all of my information in. I also keep all of my account and password information in the same binder.
A couple of times a year, I dump the whole lot through a scanner to have a back up copy and store that back up on evernote.
I have the convenience of being able to take the folder with me anywhere because of it’s size, there is nothing on the outside to make it obvious that it is my master file, and I have it backed up.