Multiplexity

I know a lot of people through my personal life and a lot of people through my work life, but there’s an important third group — people that are in both. In the book “ Friend of Friend “, author David Burkus calls this “multiplexity”. He explains:

“While we may want to categorize people into just work and personal buckets, real social networks do not seem to operate that way. And that is to our benefit. Research shows that not only does multiplexity help us become more aware of real-life opportunities, but it enhances our performance on the job-and can even enhance the performance of an entire organization.”

Contacts

I first noticed this a long time ago when trying to sort out my contact list and realized that a lot of people couldn’t be put into a single bucket. Eventually I decided that I just wanted one list of contacts, and to have it sync between my personal and business accounts. I shared this method back in 2017, but these days I essentially just use ContactsPlus to handle it.

With ContactsPlus, anyone in my personal contacts gets synced to my G Suite contacts and vice-versa. They include some other features for cleaning up the contact list, but my main concern is just keeping them synced. As a general rule, I add everyone I meet into my contacts so that if I get an inbound call I almost always know who it is. Space isn’t a…