If you are like me and read and research quite a lot on the internet you may like to know a simple technique that I use which allows me to organise quickly and efficiently all of the information that I am interested in. There is nothing more frustrating than reading some interesting piece online and then losing it by clicking away and not being able to find it again.This will be a thing of the past if you follow this simple technique.

Surfing the internet nowadays is rather like standing in front of a fire hose. More often than not, you’re likely to be inundated with information – and that may be fun at the time, but good luck trying to remember exactly what you had read even a week ago.

And this is particularly painful if you happen to be researching upon a topic, and desperately need that really informative piece – but you cannot, for the life of you, remember which site it was one. Bookmarks are a reasonable solution, but they can quickly become unwieldy.

Personally, I prefer to email important stuff to myself. Most modern email systems allow you to search emails, and that powerful feature is precisely what I use every time I want to ferret out that crucial link.

Here’s how it works. Say, for example, I just read a wonderful essay about Roger Federer, the tennis player. The author happens to be David Foster Wallace, and what really strikes me about the piece is its length, and the comparisons made between tennis and art. In that case, I write an email to myself, with the link inside it. I will also add the following (seemingly nonsensical) sentence "Roger Federer, by David Foster Wallace – really long piece about Federer, tennis, sports, art"

And the next time I need to refer to that article, I don’t need to run futile and frustrating online searches. All I need to do is go to my inbox, and search for tennis, or Federer or long piece AND tennis.

More often than not, I end up finding precisely what I want, and far faster than I would otherwise. This really works if you happen to read a lot on the internet, as I tend to. But even if you don’t, I suspect you will find that this method works far more effectively than any other.

Another advantage is the fact that you can usually access your inbox irrespective of whichever computer you are working upon – bookmarks are usually tied down to a particular computer.

All said and done, do give this method a try – I think you’ll find it very useful!