Jayson Ang commented on my post regarding childish MSN id recently. In short, he said it will be great if we could just override / rename all the name in our MSN name list. I agree! Indeed I have done that for quite some time - since I could not identify my friend who use obscure nick, standard ‘duck’ image and alien email address. Here is a snippet of my MSN name list. At the end of this post, I will share a dumb tweak I usually do…

The order and consistency of the rapidly growing name list is indeed… in my opinion… priceless. For sure, I do not want to see name like ””[[[[Aditya~Lesmana]]]]””

Of course, there is some setback of this approach. In the event my contacts decided to put their ‘latest update’ in their nick instead in their personal message field, I could never find out. Oh well… at least there will be less distraction for me.

Dumb Productivity Tweak

Notice that MSN arranges the nick/name in alphabetical order. Thus, in the event that I want to maintain a more ‘visible’ communication channel to certain small number of people temporarily - for example, project team, I often put a ‘dot’ in front of their name to literally promote their nick to the top of the list when they are online.

Another variations include adding different number of ‘dots’ to indicate different teams or priorities.

When the scope of project becomes big, involving people beyond one group (eg. SMU), I will then create another group and copy the relevant contacts there. Of course I seldom do this since moving around between groups can be quite troublesome. –> unless you change the display to ’sort by status’ (online, offline)

ps: I usually sort the name by groups. Kind of habit.