off to the recycler
In a cathartic moment of de-clutter inspiration, I rifled through 500 or so business cards I’d been holding on to from several years ago and threw almost all of them away yesterday.
Cathartic because I did not need them, unless I wanted to make an art project out of them.
Why I didn’t need the cards anymore:
- If I need to know them, we’re probably already connected on LinkedIn or Facebook.
- If I need to reach out to someone I’m not connected to, they are probably findable on LinkedIn or Facebook.
- If I do not remember someone, they probably don’t remember me.
- The card for a three-month eHarmony trial expired two years ago.
Solvate offers a whole range of digital contact services, and there are certainly times when business cards should be digitized. For example you’re a sales rep just back from Dreamforce and want a batch of cards uploaded as conference leads. You want to cross-check your cards against your LinkedIn contacts and fill in certain gaps. You are moving to a different email provider and want to take your contacts with you – and sync them with your Blackberry .
In this case, they simply needed to be sent on to the recycler.
What cards did I hold on to? Nostalgic cards. My first business card at AdBrite. My friend Chris’s card from when he first started his own business, Appssavvy. Cards from memorable meetings, like a piece of business I had won, or a meeting that went comically bad.
How to exchange information without exchanging bits of paper? I’m going to try Bump, which works if you’re on an iPhone or Android, and see if anyone else is using it. Now for that pile on my desk..
new pile.
