Why Search Is the New Productivity Superpower
Have you ever spent 15 minutes trying to find that one spreadsheet from last quarter only to give up and recreate it? Now multiply that 15 minutes by every time you encounter a similar issue each day and week. If you’re like most knowledge workers, odds are you are spending hours on difficult or completely unsuccessful searches every week. How much more do you think your business could accomplish every year if you could just figure out how to eliminate this wasted time?
Fortunately, there is a better way. In the digital workplace, the ability to quickly find what you need isn’t just convenient: it’s a productivity superpower. Here’s why mastering desktop search is crucial for modern knowledge workers and how Copernic can take your team’s searches to the next level!
The Hidden Time Sink: Searching for Information
Searching for information may not seem like a particularly time-consuming task but spending more time on searches than you need to adds up quickly.
The Scope of the Problem
Locating key information is an important part of any knowledge worker’s job, but most of these team members spend an overwhelming amount of their working hours looking for what they need instead of using it. In fact, most knowledge workers spend as much as 2.5 hours per day digging through emails, files, cloud drives, or otherwise searching for some type of information. This time often fills approximately 20-30 percent of these team members’ work days, and the majority of it could be better used to accomplish nearly anything else.
Fragmented Knowledge Ecosystems
Most workplaces do not have a centralized hub or even an effective method for keeping their files and other data organized. Instead, their information is often scattered across Google Drive, Outlook, Teams and other tools. This means that searchers do not consistently know where to begin when they need a particular document or piece of information, which results in cognitive overload and wasted time.
The Psychological Cost
Frequently spending several minutes or longer pausing to search for information instead of actively doing something else makes deep work more difficult than it should be because it disrupts team members’ workflows. Getting back into what you were doing without losing your train of thought is much easier when your first search does exactly what you need it to. Taking more time away from your actual work shifts your focus to your search process, which is more likely to result in mental clutter, task-switching fatigue, and other types of frustration.
Why Search Is the New Productivity Superpower
Effective searching has several positive impacts on other areas of a team member’s workday.
Speed = Leverage
Every search has a purpose and retrieving the information you are looking for as quickly as possible allows you to move on to completing that task faster. Each decision that is made, response that is sent, or other short task that is completed with little to no downtime contributes to getting significantly more done each day and week.
Deep Context Switching
Searching through files or data for any significant amount of time shifts your focus to searching. This often results in having a hard time getting your thoughts back to what you are working on once you finally find what you are looking for. A quick and effective search typically does not require enough time for your mind to switch to a new context, which makes getting back to the task at hand much easier.
Amplifying Institutional Knowledge
Strong search strategies typically include results that basic searches are less likely to find, such as information from your specific team’s history. This makes it much easier to find everything you need at once instead of having to sift through duplicate results from multiple searches.
Mastering Desktop Search: Tactics and Tools
Leveraging a variety of tools and strategies can help your business’s knowledge workers perform significantly more effective searches.
Leverage Advanced Search Operators
A basic file search can be a good starting point, but a surface-level search is not always enough to find exactly what you are looking for. Choosing a more advanced strategy is often a more effective way to problem solve than simply trying different search terms. Some common options include:
- Boolean logic
- Searching by file type
- Filtering results by date
- Semantic searches
Integrate a Search Tool Like Copernic
Copernic Desktop & Cloud Search is a cutting-edge search tool that streamlines the process of locating information on your desktop, cloud platform, or other places your business stores information. Copernic’s features include:
- Deep searches through 170+ file types
- Desktop, network, and cloud searches
- Exceptional security
- Coverage for 11 languages
- Detailed tools to refine your search
- Real-time searches that start before you finish typing
- Minimal memory and other spec needs
- Fast results
Make Search Muscle Memory
Hotkeys and workflows make it easier for team members to automatically apply effective search strategies. Searching first and organizing later is another helpful habit when it comes to improving search efficiency.
The Productivity ROI of Great Search
Taking the time to learn how to search more efficiently often results in improved focus and a significant amount of saved time.
Time Saved Per Week
Each team member that spends 3-5 hours searching for information during a typical work week wastes approximately 150-250 hours per year. Multiplying this lost time by the number of knowledge workers your business employs shows that you likely have far more time available than you think. By exponentially improving the efficiency of your team’s searches, your business has the potential to turn a massive amount of poorly used time into time spent working on new goals and projects.
Reduced Cognitive Load
Multitasking has its place, but overusing this strategy in less-appropriate ways often results in difficulty focusing on any task. Having more time available makes it easier for team members to devote adequate mental energy to tasks that require deep focus, which leads to better results.
Faster Collaboration
Collaboration plays an important role in maximizing the productivity of your business, but a single team member that spends a significant amount of time searching for information often creates a bottleneck that prevents another team member from completing a task that requires that information. Team members that must wait for someone else to stop wasting time often get behind in their own work, and improving search efficiency makes staying on track easier for everyone.
Final Thoughts: Search as a Skill, Not Just a Tool
Locating exactly what you are looking for right when you need it is not always easy, but effective searching is a core digital skill that all team members can be intentional about improving. Much like typing, using spreadsheets, writing professional emails, and careful scheduling, having a reasonable understanding of how to conduct an effective digital search plays a key role in efficiently filling nearly any position that involves a significant amount of computer use. Wasting time performing somewhat relevant searches without zeroing in on exactly what you are looking for produces similar results to typing with two fingers or creating your daily schedule as you go, but the right tools and strategies can significantly improve your search skills.
Choose Copernic Desktop & Cloud Search to Maximize Your Productivity
At Copernic, we prioritize giving team members the tools they need to find exactly what they are looking for without wasting time on searches that come close but do not quite hit the target. Our software includes a wide selection of extensions to simplify the process of finding specific data, documents, and other key information across nearly any program your business uses, including Microsoft Office products, Adobe tools, Kindle books, and various cloud-based platforms.
Copernic Desktop & Cloud Search quickly locates results across over 170 types of files to help you find just what you are looking for in as little time as possible to boost your cloud and desktop search productivity. Try our software free for 30 days to start the process of turning wasted time into extra resources that can be better used to grow other aspects of your business!