Millions of people use computers the world over every day. Millions of e-mails are sent each day. People use their computers for holding their music files, photographs and sometimes large volumes of other information. With all this electronic information, it becomes important to be able to find files or e-mails quickly. Using tags, or labels, can help you achieve this efficiently.

All e-mail clients have options available for sorting and finding messages. You may be able to use keywords in the subject or other parts of the message to direct your e-mail client to put the message in a particular folder. In Microsoft Outlook, for example, you can create physical folders and set up rules to have all your messages automatically organized for you. Microsoft Outlook also has ‘Search Folders’ which are virtual folders. The messages appear to be in a folder, but a physical folder does not exist. Using a Search Folder, you can not only file your e-mail messages according to a keyword in the subject, you can also use different search criteria to retrieve them, such as the name of the person who sent it. E-mail messages can also be sent to more than one virtual folder.

The free web-based inbox.com, as well as popular e-mail programs like Microsoft Outlook, allow the user to use labels and colors to organize mail. You can create as many labels as you like and associate colors with them. Multiple labels can be assigned to messages. Once you have created a label you can find all messages that have that label simply by clicking on the label in the Email labels box.

Messages are not the only items that you want to be able to organize and find quickly. Finding the files that you want on your computer can also be a chore as the number of directories and folders increases. Google Desktop can make searching your computer as easy as doing a search on the web. With Google Desktop you can do a full text search of your e-mail, music, photographs, files, chats, web pages and more. You don’t have to manually organize your bookmarks, e-mails or files. Once you install Google Desktop, it automatically indexes the e-mail, files and web history stored on your computer. Depending on how much data you have this can take a long time, but the indexing is only done once and it only runs when your computer has been idle for more than 30 seconds. This ensures it does not have an impact on anything that you might be doing. Once the index has been created, it is updated every time you receive a new e-mail, browse a new web page, or update a file. You can then use the search box to find items such as files and the search will return the most relevant items. You can also restrict the search to certain types of items, such as files only.

Almost all file systems keep metadata on files. The metadata may be held in directory entries, specialized structures such as inodes or the name of the file. Metadata may be timestamps or bit modes or it can be more specialized information. With more complicated metadata it becomes possible to search for files using the contents of the metadata. Examples of such facilities are the UNIX find utility, Apple Mac’s Spotlight, and Instant Search in Windows Vista which allows you to tag your files by creating custom properties. Tags in the metadata can help you to quickly search whole libraries of documents.

Internet browsers such as Microsoft Internet Explorer allow you to create bookmarks which you can organize in folders, thus making it easier to find your favorite sites. Some browsers also use tags to organize the bookmarks. For example, Firefox allows you to quickly find your favorite sites by entering the bookmark name, tag or page in the location bar. The more you use the tags the more Firefox will be able to adapt to your preferences. Firefox has an extension called Bookmark Tags. When you create a bookmark, rather than file it in a folder, you give it a tag and Bookmark Tags then files it for you. When you want to find the bookmark, you use the tag rather than looking through folders and subfolders.

If you have a lot of icons on your desktop, you can use the icon name as a tag to quickly find an icon. For example, if you want to find an icon called ‘test,’ click on any icon and press ’t.’ Pressing ‘t’ multiple times will find all the icons beginning with ‘t.’

Now is the time to get organized and remember to put that entry into the subject line of your e-mail.  Such a small step can make your life much easier if a problem arises and you need to find that relevant e-mail quickly.