Often in life, it's the little things that drive you nuts. In my case one of them is finding a way to keep my contact book in order.

I’ve tried various methods over the years. In my early days it was a simple as keeping an A5-sized notebook with tabbed pages for each letter of the alphabet. Contact details were written on the relevant page amid business cards held in place with stickytape. Low tech, but it worked.

Information retrieval was quick and out-of-date details could be corrected with a pen. The major downside was that, should you lose your book, your wealth of contacts could be gone forever.

I adopted a different method when the Palm Pilot arrived on the scene. This revolutionary little device allowed you to carry all your contact (and diary) details with you at all times. Retrieval was fast - though not as fast as the paper method - but you had to learn a quirky way of writing on the screen to enter new details.

One big advantage was that you could synchronise your Palm Pilot with your PC, allowing you to keep a back-up copy of your contacts.

For me, this method lasted until smart phones appeared on the scene. Ushering the Palm Pilot into the dustbin of history, they allowed you to keep your contacts synchronised with your PC and also use the stored phone numbers to actually make calls – revolutionary stuff. It seemed like the perfect contact management solution.

But now along comes another development called cloud computing. Rather than storing details on a physical device, the cloud allows you to store it on the internet and then access it from any device you choose.

This sounds great in theory, but I’m yet to get it to work properly in practice. I'm still searching for the easiest way to keep my Outlook contact lists synchronised with a cloud-based store and my smartphone. Sure, there are ways to do it, but I’m yet to find one that works seamlessly.

I’m constantly finding that details I’ve entered into Outlook are not on my phone. I’m also yet to find a cloud service that can work quietly in the background keeping everything together.

It’s frustrating because it’s not a difficult ask. Keeping a single, up-to-date contact list synchronised across multiple devices should be a straightforward and painless thing to do.

Any ideas? How do you keep your contact lists in order?