Google: A Tool For Productivity

So you guys all know Google right? Of course! Its the most relied upon search engine; but do you know how to use it effectively? Well no worries. We'll be covering that here today. 

Chrome Extensions

First up, everyone's best friend, extensions. Do you ever find yourself buried in emails and can't seem to figure out what's most urgent to reply to and what can wait until you finish a more pressing task? According to Eva Short's blog Want to be more productive? These chrome extensions could help from siliconrepublic; there is an extension for this by the name of Snooze Email. You simply snooze the email as the title suggests and is timed to pop back up in your inbox when you are ready to read it. Yes it temporarily removes it so that it doesn't disappear and guarantees that you get to this task on a timely manner. 

Short also mentions three other really good extensions worth mentioning. StayFocused, Just Read, and Todoist. Stay Focused sets a timer for how long you can spend on certain sites for the day so that you can focus more on the work than being distracted by other websites causing you to ultimately neglect your work. Be honest, we've all done it. I'm a big procrastinator myself. The other extension I mentioned was Just Read. This extension can be helpful because it strips away anything eyecatching on a page. Ads on the side of the site? Gone. This extension removes all distractions and leaves just a page full of words so that you can focus on the information and not get carried away to buy yourself a new pair of shoes. There is also Todoist. This is an extension that is essentially a to do list. This helps you declutter your schedule and help you stay organized. According to Dr. Cynthia Green, a clinical psychologist and author, organization tends to lead to more productivity because we are less likely to forget what needs to be done.

Google Efficiently

Now that we have covered the extensions, onto how to effectively Google search. You might say "wait, there's a specific and better way to google?" Yes there is, so let's get into it. Did you know that you can actually narrow down your search just by simply using quotations around the phrase? According to Joseph Hindy's blog 20 Google Search Tips To Use Google More Efficiently, using quotations narrows down the result. The example he used was "if you search puppy dog sweaters, the engine will search for any content that contains any of the three words" (Hindy, n.d.). The tip Hindy mentioned is shown as "puppy dog sweaters". This specifies to google that you want to search up this phrase with the words in this particular order thus giving you more precise searches. Hindy mentions some other handy ones as well. The first one is using a colon to search up specific sites. This would aid in finding specific articles or content from the website you specify after the colon. Another is being able to search up two phrases at once. You can do this by putting each phrase in quotations but use the terms "and" or "or" between these phrases. The word "and" means that both phrases must be mentioned within each website while "or" gives google the range to find articles that include these separately.

Being More Productive

Aside from Chrome Extensions and knowing how to Google efficiently, the search engine also has ways to keep you productive. As stated by Andra Picincu's article, 7 Google Chrome Tips That Will Boost Your Productivity, you can find specific file types for a document you may be searching for. Whether the file is a PDF, JPEG, or PNG, you can type in the phrase "filetype:" to find the file you need. Google also allows you to use a timer or stopwatch on its own search bar. That way, you don't have to rely on a phone or watch for a timer or alarm. It also stops you from being distracted from said phone. If trying to research for a school or work project, you can find credible sources by searching the following: "site:*.gov "keyword"". Based on the type of credible source, you would change the ".gov" to either ".edu" or ".org", and replacing the word "keyword" with the term(s) you are searching for. Along with that, Andra Picincu states that you can organize your tabs together by downloading a Chrome extension, Session Buddy. She states that you can save and restore apps with the extension, as well as organizing up to dozens of tabs into one folder.

With a powerful tool like Google at everyone's fingertips, it is important to know how to navigate the search engine and use its resources and tools at our advantage. There are a ton of ways to redefine our searches with hyphens and quotation marks, and Google also comes with a lot of extensions and built-in features to help us become more productive and less distracted from ads or emails. The tips mentioned are only a few tips and tricks that can better help one use Google and Google Chrome better, but there are a lot more to be discovered.