Contact List Management

I seem to have spent quite a lot of time over the last three or four years battling with my contact lists to keep them synced, current and de-duplicated. The root cause of the problem is that I want my contact information to be available in lots of places - phone, tablet, work mail client, home mail client, home laptop address book etc. - so that I always have access to it. This is a fine and noble goal but there are a few issues keeping me from my Contact Nirvana.

Firstly, I have three cloud contact providers, all of which I want to use, for one reason or another: Gmail (home email), iCloud (non-email purposes) and Exchange (work email). Three-way syncing and de-duplicating is non-trivial, especially when each service assumes it the definitive source.

Secondly, my home laptop doesn't want to sync Contact information from my work Exchange server. The problem seems to be that Outlook/Exchange use a number of different address books and the OS X address book doesn't sync with the right one, so no contact information is downloaded (there's bound to be a way to fix this but so far it remains hidden in the noise at the Microsoft/Apple border).
Finally, all three services have "features" and idiosyncrasies which prevent them playing nicely together (probably for sound commercial reasons) and make contact management more difficult than is strictly necessary.

I could sort this out by hand (download each address book to Excel or Numbers, normalise the fields, de-duplicate the entries then upload a new list to each service) but this solution is prone to errors, takes a long time and needs to be done regularly to keep the three lists in sync; awkward.

It would be nice to define one service as the master and slave the other two to it so that updates to the master propagated down to the slaves. Nice, but not currently possible (see comments about idiosyncrasies, above).

There might be a solution amongst the third-party contact management systems (Xobni, for example) but they all cost money and there's no way of knowing if they will do the job; risky.
If the APIs for these services are publicly available (assuming they exist) it might be possible to build an app that queried one service and updated a second, de-duplicating as it goes. Possible, maybe, but this is not a quick or easy solution.

My only realistic solution, as far as I can see, is to scour the Internet in the hope of finding someone who has not only suffered from the same problem but has had the time and energy to build and document a solution. Such a person would surely be lauded across the land, as indeed would anyone who could identify such a person and make their achievements more widely known. So far, my efforts in this direction have not met with significant success but I'll keep trying; updates to follow, probably.

Impressions of Sydney

Sydney is Australia's oldest, largest and most diverse city (this is pretty much the first thing that all the guidebooks tell you). Here are a few tips for your first visit.

• The people are friendly and helpful, especially if you are used to somewhere a little more reserved, like London (where you can go days without speaking to anyone, if you choose).
• Sydney, still a relatively young city, is blessed with two internationally famous landmarks - the Harbour Bridge and the Opera House. Both can be inspected at close range, either by climbing (the bridge - best done on a clear day) or by a guided tour (the Opera House - best done on a damp, overcast day). The Harbour provides the backdrop for most of the tourist activities in the city so it's worth exploring by ferry or on foot (around the edges, obviously).
• The food and drink are expensive, even from the skewed perspective of someone who lives in London, and visitors should prepare themselves for bar bills of Scandinavian proportions. In Sydney the beer will be good but £7-8 a pint (Fat Yak Pale Ale is worth trying, if you can find it). Main courses in decent restaurants start at around the £14 and head rapidly higher but bargains can be found if you're prepared to shop around.
• Navigation is easy because Sydney is laid out on a grid, a style of town planning apparently favoured by most modern cities. This is a boon to the visiting tourist but means the city lacks some of the charm of older European cities, like Rome or Paris. 
• Sydney seems to prefer new to old, meaning that much of downtown Sydney is modern and shiny. Older buildings can sometimes be found crouching timidly between the skyscrapers or incorporated into their lower floors (the city is confident enough to retain some of the old to balance the brash thrusting of the newer towers) but the centre of town is dominated by soulless glass towers that you might see in any large city.
• With the grid layout comes, almost inevitably, an over reliance on the internal combustion engine. Cars and buses crowd the streets and an almost total lack of other transport options make Sydney a somewhat grim place for pedestrians. Heavy traffic and lots of walkers (there are, strangely, almost no bicycles and very few motorbikes) make for crowded pavements and tricky road crossings (although the traffic moves so slowly that you generally don't need to wait for the crossing lights to change).
• The weather, which was supposed to be warm and sunny in November when I visited, is becoming more changeable and less reliable. Some of the locals put this down to global warming but the appetite for change (for example by curbing car usage) seems limited. 

Sydney is a great place to visit with friendly locals and plenty of things to see and do, especially if you like surfing or other beach/water activities. Highly recommended if you're in the area.

Bikes and Buses

London's roads are not lightly driven. Danger lurks around every corner, a plethora of hazards waiting to ensnare the unwary and bring them crashing to a halt in a blaze of light and crushed metal.

But surely there are some amongst us stout enough to brave the dangers, to drive where mere mortals fear to steer, to put themselves in the front line of urban travel for the benefit of their fellow Londoners? Yes! There they are - the stalwart drivers of London's myriad bus companies, rescuing us from the terrors of the roads and carrying passengers to their destination safely and quickly in both comfort and style.

But let nobody imagine that life on the mean streets of London is free from risk. Bus drivers face a terrible danger from which they protect us on a daily basis; cyclists.

Cyclists are, by far, the most dangerous road user that a bus can encounter. Small, soft, slow and nimble, cycles float around buses like flies around a corpse, pushing their way through narrow gaps, taking up space on the road and generally antagonising the poor bus drivers. Like a flock of crows around a hawk, cyclists mob buses and force their drivers to take defensive action against in the face of persistent attacks.

Let me give you an example. If you sit at the front of the upper deck of a London bus you will regularly see cyclists deliberately and aggressively slow down when they realise there is a bus following them (don't try to blame hills, road conditions, weather, fatigue or other traffic - everyone knows that these things don't affect London's psychotic cyclists). The tactic is always the same; cyclists, individually or in groups, intimidate drivers of double decker buses by slowing so that their back wheel is mere inches from the front bumper of the bus. Often they will swerve randomly across the road (ignore obviously false explanations like "I was turning right" or "I needed to avoid a parked car") to further inconvenience the heroic driver of the ten-ton transport behemoth.

Cyclists often flock together to better disrupt the activities of their enemies. Wearing bright colours (for example a terrifying neon yellow high-visibility jacket), carrying numerous flashing LED lights to distract tired drivers or sporting ridiculous headgear to advertise their presence, cyclists will take whatever means necessary to disguise their true purpose (traffic disruption) and to attract like-minded sexual partners so that they can spawn ever-larger crowds of bus-hating fanatics.

The solution, and it is the only one available to address this appalling state of affairs, is to stop cyclists from using the public highways upon which they currently torment our bus drivers. On major roads they should instead be restricted to a dedicated network of cycle paths, leaving the bus lanes free from danger and allowing the esteemed bus drivers to proceed along their allocated route without fear of interference or aggravation from scores of brightly coloured, easily spotted, bus-fearing cyclists.

Handling Your Inbox

How do you handle your inbox? Whatever you do, the chances are you get more email than you really need and that it often distracts you from the things you should really be doing. How well you manage your inbox can have a big impact on the way you do your job; here are some tips.

1. Notifications - Outlook, by default, pops a message to your screen every time you receive an email. This is very useful until you receive more than a few emails a day, at which point it becomes a huge distraction. Turn off pop-up notifications and use rules to alert you to important messages, like those sent with high priority, from key customers or from your boss. 
2. Use folders - once you have setup your rules, use them to move your important email to a separate folder so that you can check those messages without being distracted by other, less urgent, communications.
3. Don't check your email - it is tempting to check for new email every few minutes, particularly if you're working through a long, boring task. Try not to do this and stick instead with your chosen task.
4. Work from a task list - don't use your inbox as a surrogate task list. Instead, list and prioritise your tasks in a separate application (Word, Evernote, Excel, Trello or whatever best suits your workflow) so that you don't need to hit your inbox, and risk distraction, to find your next task.
5. Distribution lists - choose your distribution lists with care; do you really need to see every email sent to every team? Be brutal; remove yourself from any list that isn't absolutely key to your normal daily task and trust your colleagues to forward to you anything for which they need your input. 
6. Hide your client - is your email client always visible on the screen? Minimise it or hide it behind your active windows to reduce its ability to interrupt you. If you're working on a difficult or time-sensitive task, close your client.
7. Trust your colleagues - if you are on the cc list of a non-urgent email, skim read it then let your colleagues deal with it. If they really need your input they'll ask (the flip side is that you may need to nudge colleagues who are similarly trusting you to contact them with anything urgent or important).
8. Finally, tackle your regular, unimportant email only between major tasks in 15-30 minute blocks. Aim to reduce your inbox to zero unread messages during that session by working through all your messages, responding to any that can be quickly handled, adding new tasks to your task list when quick answers aren't possible and coldly ignoring anything that doesn't actually require your attention. Once you're done, minimise your client and pick up the next task from your list.

These tips won't magically shrink your workload but they should help you to manage it more efficiently and that can be a big win in a competitive or high-pressure workplace.