June 30, 2008

I started my career in Engineering back in 1979, well before the error of the Personal Computer. For many years, the only form of mail I received was that which came in the post. These typed letters were never a problem to locate or find as they were filed away in filing cabinets appropriately labelled.

With the advent of email this all changed. Instead of relying on a typing pool to do my correspondence, I was suddenly the typing pool. In the early days, there were only a few engineers that corresponded with email using packages like Pegasus Mail, so I was not inundated with incoming mail. But as the popularity of the Personal Computer increased and the internet took off in a direction of its own, I found that more and more company mail was of the electronic format.

I have always been an organised person and my old filing cabinets neatly labelled and alphabetically sorted meant I could put my hand on any correspondence in a moment. I found that email was not quite the same. Through the years I have tried many different methods in dealing with my email Inbox. I have tried folders sorted by date, folders sorted by company name or persons name. None of these systems seemed to help me get the same level of organisation and retrieval I needed.

I even followed a system that I found on Microsoft's website, but this too only left me in frustration. You see the problem I have with email is that the correspondence I receive can come from any of my nearly one hundred clients. These clients may have a number of projects or engineering issues we are dealing with at the same site. There is also often more than one person on the same site that I am working with. This made keeping the right information together difficult, so merely using a Client Folder, like ABC Limited did not help me.

Then there were internal memos from my own team or managers that needed to be kept for administrative reasons. Sometimes these memos related to clients, where special discounts were given or special procedures guaranteed. I think you can get the picture of where I am going with all of this. Before too long I was stuck sifting through hundreds of emails from many sources looking for that one email I know I received last week that had that important information in it, key to this part of the project. My frustration with this procedure of locating email information grew to the point where I despised my Inbox and the use of email.

It was then that an IT friend of mine said I should try the Copernic Desktop Search Engine. I was surprised to find that this software was free. I downloaded a version of Copernic off the Copernic website. This is the web address: http://www.copernic.com/

This was back in 2003. What a difference this product has made to my life. Finding that elusive email has become a breeze because Copernic allows me several search options, ranging from subject, sender or specific words in the content of the email that I may be looking for. Not only does Copernic index all my emails but it also does the same for my other documents which are Word, Excel or Acrobat based. Now, just like my old filing system, I can pretty much lay my hand on the email or document I am looking for in a few seconds, as long as I can remember the sender or part of the content. This has improved my efficiency a hundred fold and my stress levels are much lower. I know that if Copernic cannot find what I am looking for, I do not have a copy of it stored on my computer.