This is Stevea Robbins.

Welcome to the Get It Done guys, quick and dirty tips to work less and do more.

My friend Ashin has been cursed with the need to travel to the underworld.

Well, I mean Silicon Valley.

In order to find some fiends, I mean friends, to lunch with, he went to LinkedIn.

But to his horror and LinkedIn's delight,

the site refused to let him search his contacts. LinkedIn gave him an alert. He had exceeded his search limit for the month and would have to upgrade to a paid plan to access information

about his very own contact list. Yay! Welcome to the 21st century. We trust third-party

providers with all of our important data. Why? Because it makes life simpler, particularly when

you're on the go, and this being the 21st century, on the go is the new black. But we need our contact data.

Handing it off to cloud providers leaves us open to extortion. Oh, excuse me, leaves us open to

reasonable service fees. How do we avoid reasonable service fees? By address book, while

keeping up convenience, we put the information in our address book on our local machine, and we use our own system to track it.

To start, copy your cloud-based contacts into a local contacts book.

If you're on a Mac, you can do this in just a few steps.

First, go to system preferences.

From there, go to Internet accounts. You'll see a list of accounts. If you don't, click the plus button in the lower left.

Click on one that has some contacts that you want to grab and enter your login information. It'll pop up a list of apps that the account will interact with, including contacts.

Click sign in to connect to the account and wait a few minutes for everything to synchronize.

Soon, your contacts app will contain all of the contacts from that account. If you change your

mind later, you can disconnect the account with the option of removing the contacts you got from

it by just clicking the minus button in the bottom left of the same menu. What could be easier?

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