I use it multiple times throughout the day to find fragments of information from web pages, e-mails, word documents and so on. Phone numbers, passwords, e-mail addresses you name it,  in less than 3 seconds I can usually find what I’m looking for.

I’ve never been one of those anal-retentive-frustrated-librarian type people who set up nice little folders in Outlook or Thunderbird.  All my e-mails are in one big lump.  And you know how useless and slow the Outlook search facility is?

Every so often I delete the old sent and received e-mails knowing and trusting that if I really need to find something my Google desktop file will be able to locate it in seconds.

My Word documents are the same. Having a my documents folder is about as organised as I want to get.

The great thing about Google Desktop is that it works across most applications. I just hit my control key twice, and up pops the search window. By default it searches the local index first.

The search results are listed in reverse chronological order with the most recent listings at the top.

You can search by exact string matching and also filter by file type be it e-mail, document type or web page.

You can also set it up to index shared drives which is great for finding old files created by co-workers who are as disorganised as you are.

So, if you install any new application this year I suggest that you check out Google desktop. It’s free - but Google gets just a little bit of your soul.  Download it here.