O.P.E.S. (Part 4): Briefing On Efficiency

Being efficient is a great way to reduce daily stress, allowing you to achieve a high rate of productivity with less time spent doing a task. A great way to increase efficiency is to improve both improve organization and preparation techniques. If you have those two techniques down pat, being efficient will naturally fall into place.   As I like to say, "work smart, not hard." Today I will discuss a few more techniques I hope will help give ideas to increase your own efficiency.

1. Shop when the stores are less crowded. I love to shop on the weekday around 10am. This time at least for me, my No Frills is practically empty. This reduces the stress of fighting the crowds allowing for more concentration which will lead to more efficient and faster shopping. In addition, because they don't have a line up at their register, the cashiers are also less stressed and more willing to help. Making the chances of having any issues about a coupon or a price match decrease.

2. Take advantage of price matching. Almost every grocery store price matches against competitor ads. This allows you the coupon user a way to "have your cake and eat it too". In the end, this saves you both time and gas, allowing you to get all your deals at one store by using other store flyers to get the better deals. The only catch with price matching is usually a bit of hassle. However, as I've shared in my earlier posts please feel free to view my download page to download a price match data spreadsheet. Using the spreadsheet will take take the hassle out of price matching, allowing you to increase your savings, adding to the amount you already saved by using coupons. 

3. Spend less time searching on Google with these tips to produce faster results. Ever search for something only to end up an hour later with nothing but stress and still no results? These few pointers can be used to search for anything on Google more efficiently. But for todays examples they will be geared to finding coupons and shopping deals online.

Either/orGoogle normally searches for pages that contain all the words you type in the search box, but if you want pages that have one term or another (or both), use the OR operator -- or use the "|" symbol (pipe symbol) to save you [coupon | code | gillette]

Quotes
If you want to search for an exact phrase, use quotes. ["charmin printable coupon"] will only find that exact phrase. [charmin "printable coupon"] will find pages that contain the word charmin and the exact phrase "printable coupon."

Not
If you don't want a term or phrase, use the "-" symbol. [-expired coupon codes] will return pages that contain "coupon" and "codes" but that don't contain "expired."

Including

If you want to include all words in a search, use the "+" symbol. [coupons +codes +gillette] will return pages that contain  "coupon" "codes" and "gillette."

File types
If you just want to search for .PDF files, or Word documents, or Excel spreadsheets, for example, use the "filetype:" operator. For example I will search: ["coupon policy" filetype:pdf]. This will give me a result of every PDF file available that includes the phrase "coupon policy."

Site-specific
Use the "site:" operator to search only within a certain website. [site:smartcanucks.ca coupons] will search for the term "coupons" only within this site. The "site:" operator can also be used to search within a specific domain such as [site:.ca coupons] This will give me a result of all sites that end in .ca and also contain "coupons."