A manager recently described to me his system for handling his incoming email, which he viewed as quite inadequate. He would go through his voluminous new mail each day, then move it all to one folder. At least he wasn’t keeping it in the Inbox like the “I’ve got 6,000 messages in my Inbox” crowd; but his problem was that when he’d need to find a message again he often couldn’t.

Some people solve the problem by maintaining a carefully defined folder hierarchy to archive old messages; for others, this just doesn’t match the way they work. But even if you do have a good filing system, after a while there are just too many messages, and you can forget who sent you the one you’re looking for, or where it would fit. The fact is that knowledge workers spend 15% of their work time on searching for information (according to a Basex study made in 2008). Another fact is that they don’t always find the stuff, even if they know with certainty that it’s on their hard disk, within the clutter of documents, files and mail messages they’d stored there themselves.

This is a serious problem. Knowledge work is often an exercise in associative thinking: you vaguely recollect that someone had once sent you a message with an attachment that had a nugget of valuable information for your current task; you find it, and it points you to another source, or suggests another search… whereas if you can’t find the first item you may miss a key point. And nothing is more maddening than knowing the data is in there, and having no idea how to get to it – like the manager I was talking to.

Enter Desktop Search tools. This is the class of software tools that do for your hard disk what Google does for the web. Not surprisingly, Google makes one of them (Google Desktop); there are many others, some new, some old. The first one, though, is long gone: I remember fondly Alta Vista Personal, from the folks that gave us the first really good web search engine. Windows 7 also claims to have such capability, but so far I haven’t found it very effective; I prefer to get a tool from someone who specializes in the tool’s domain.

My favorite for some years now has been X1 Search, a truly powerful tool that combines full text Boolean search with a built-in preview for most any kind of file. This tool can find in one second any appearance of a search expression anywhere on my disk – in files, mails, contacts, attachments, files within zip archives… and while I do keep a rough hierarchy of subject folders, I don’t even bother to use it; searching is faster and more certain. With this tool, I have total mastery over my stored information; without it I’d be totally handicapped in my work. If you’re into any kind of serious knowledge work, you must have this, or a similar, tool; check out what’s available here. It will cut down a chunk of those 15% of wasted time…