At work, you are heavily dependent on your computer; this becomes a bigger truth if you are a small business owner or a freelancer. As a freelancer, you are certainly on your own, and probably don’t have a staff to delegate tasks to. To be able to work productively you not only need to be a pro at organizing your files and documents, but you need to be a pro at finding them later, maybe even with a professional desktop search tool. There are great benefits to knowing how to use desktop search properly, especially in your professional life.
Desktop Search: The Freelancer’s Personal Assistant
1. March 2016 15:51
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Desktop Search for Freelancers
Before jumping into the benefits that desktop search can bring you, you should first organize your desktop for better search results. Desktop search will work, but not as well if you have complete chaos on your computer, so get that under control first. Once that is done, you can rest assured that your desktop search tool is going to give you the results you need quickly and efficiently, and you’ll have an easier time identifying them.
As a freelancer, whether you’re a writer or a graphic designer, you will most likely have a collection of folders on your PC and a lot of files and documents to deal with. Wouldn’t it be nice to be able to find what you need without having to dig through hundreds of folders? A good desktop search program will do that for you. It will find the graphic you made for a client last year, the article you wrote two months ago, or the invoice from last week. Your desktop search will gather and present all of your data to you without you scratching your head wondering which folder you placed it in, what year it was created, whether it was in an email or saved to your desktop.
Time is Money
Freelancers probably know better than anyone that the effort you put in is what you get out. You need to put time and energy into your work to succeed, and as such, freelancing is not for everyone. You don’t have anyone to delegate to so you have to be a jack-of-all-trades, and any tools that make your work easier, quicker, or more productive are almost necessary. This is where a desktop search tool can help you out. As stated above, it will be able to dig through stacks and stacks of data that you can’t even begin to grasp, and find every imaginable item you could need for your work.
Desktop search is simple in theory, but in practice it will boost your productivity more than you’d think. Spending less time searching will naturally increase the amount of time you have to focus on more meaningful tasks – whether that’s getting another project completed or spending more time with your friends and family.
The Ins and Outs of Desktop Search
As someone who relies almost entirely on yourself to accomplish your business goals, you are used to having to learn about new things. Desktop search should be no different. To truly gain any benefit from it, you need to learn how it works. You already know that the key to success is keeping your desktop organized but there are a few other tips to consider when using a search tool. Here are a few:
- Learn the program’s search syntax to help narrow down your search results.
- Learn about and choose the right indexing options for you.
- Learn how to fix your desktop search tool if it has any issues.
These are just a few things that will boost the benefits of using a desktop search tool, whether it’s Windows’ or Mac’s native search tool, or a third party software such as Lookeen. Effective desktop search is going to be your biggest help when you need to find files and folders for your clients or work. You are on your own for the most part as a freelancer, and having such an efficient tool in your arsenal can only help.
Don’t have the budget for a full-blown desktop search tool? Try Lookeen Free – all the same functionality as our business version, without the business price tag.
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