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Keeping track of people in my life?

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

TOPICS: Life Hacks
GOD's picture

I haven't attended to it...

I haven't attended to it as much as I should, but I've intended to keep a list of people and a log for each person. For instance, I have a list of people my girlfriend mentions and whenever I hear new information about them I add a dated entry to their individual log.

At first I was going to keep this in a text file. Jedit and other "folding" text editors are great for something like this. But it had to be something that I could edit on my pocket pc so I started keeping it in listpro.

I should also mention that this is also intended to be part of a larger "personal database" of information, or perhaps a personal wiki. One piece of info I have in there that I've referred to recently has been my bank account number. I also keep meaning to put in a definition of Shia and Sunni Islam in there.

You might be interested in "Dunbar's number":

http://www.lifewithalacrity.com/2004/03/the_dunbar_numb.html

 
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