Top 10 Gmail Tips for Power Users
Everyone has a Gmail account. We’re all used to archiving, marking, and marking bad senders as spam, but you probably still spend a lot of time in your inbox, especially if you use Gmail in your work. Here are ten tips to save you time and make your transition to Inbox Zero easier.
10. Using multiple mailboxes to organize multiple accounts in one window.
You may have your own Gmail account and another Google account to work with. Perhaps you have multiple Gmail accounts to keep things separate, like one for your friends and one for your resume. Either way, multiple inboxes can combine them all, make it easier to reply from the correct address to the right person, and provide you with a single view for all of your email, instead of forcing you to open multiple tabs or windows.
The multiple mailbox feature has been around for a long time , no doubt about it, but it’s still buried in labs so you may have never tried it. Once you do this, the rules of the game change.
9. Use Boomerang to snooze and schedule messages
Boomerang is one of our favorite Gmail utilities. This will help you make sure your inbox is not overloaded and can even help you create emails and replies that will actually be read by recipients .
At its core, Boomerang can ensure that you queue messages whenever you have time to respond to email, and then send them at a convenient time for the sender to receive them – which is ideal if you work in different time zones, or clearing your mailbox in the middle of the night. Likewise, it can “postpone” messages in your inbox, removing them from view until a set time, when it returns to your inbox, when you (hopefully) have time to address or reply to it. This is great for cleaning up your inbox clutter and making sure you only see what you can focus on right now.
8. Dive into the experimental Gmail lab.
Multiple inboxes are a Google Labs feature, like some of the other items on this list, but if you have the time and opportunity, it’s worth delving deeper into Gmail Labs . There are many additional tools and features out there that, although ignored in many cases for years, still work great and can save you tons of time and energy.
If you need help choosing labs to get started, we have a list of ten great ones . There is even more that is useful for certain types of employees, depending on what you do in your inbox every day. Bottom line, don’t overlook the Labs, they are full of great tools, and just because people don’t talk about them as often anymore, they are still very useful.
7. Use Sortd to turn your inbox into a Trello-style to-do list.
If you’re using Trello to organize your life outside of your inbox, Sortd is a utility that can bring some of this magic to your inbox . It turns your emails and to-do’s into card-like lists that you can drag and drop, mark complete, and organize easily. Sortd allows you to see important messages visually in columns, turn important messages into tasks and reminders you won’t forget, and add or create your own tasks without cluttering your inbox on other platforms.
6. Create endless email addresses that will arrive in one mailbox.
This is another tip that has been around for a very, very long time , but is still incredibly underrated. If you have any reason to believe that someone is going to give your email address or spam you, reformat it by adding a plus sign between the words . Everything is sent to the same address, which makes it easy to see who sold you and filter out the spam you receive.
For example, if you want to make sure that the shiny new newsletter you signed up to doesn’t share your email address with spammers, subscribe to it with myaddress [email protected] . It will still dump the newsletter in your inbox, but if you suddenly start receiving other emails to that address, such as ad junk or spam, you know who they got it from.
5. Master the many keyboard shortcuts in Gmail.
Like many Google products, Gmail has a variety of keyboard shortcuts to help you complete tasks instead of wasting time pointing, clicking, and navigating looking for specific buttons or commands. Can you see them all by typing ? on any screen in Gmail . If you want to make them all easier to see, this cheat sheet lists the biggest and most useful ones .
If you have trouble remembering them, as I do, KeyRocket for Gmail helps you remember them by reminding you to use them when you forget and doing things in a complex, manual way.
4. Turn on “Undo Send” to revert messages you did not want to send.
The ability to “cancel” mail was once buried in Gmail Labs, but it is now part of the default Gmail feature set – you just need to enable it in your Gmail settings . Regardless of whether you only realized after hitting the submit button that your message was filled with typos and errors, or was sent to the wrong person (or you left someone important!), Or written hastily and in anger, and you really should have taken more time to stop and think before sending it, Undo Sending gives you five, ten, twenty or thirty seconds (your choice) to hit “cancel” after sending the message to pick it up.
3. Disable endless streams and block annoying senders
If you’re new to Gmail’s mute feature, it’s time to take a closer look. If you’ve ever been part of a seemingly endless chain of answers to all questions, Mute is your best friend . Open a specific conversation, or select it in your Inbox, and then simply go to the More menu and select Disconnect. The thread will continue and you can even check it manually if you want, but new messages in the thread will no longer clutter up your inbox. However, if you really need to resume the conversation, you can always turn it on .
Likewise, Google gave us the ability to block specific senders without having to create filters for that address about a year ago, so you could skip that. This is a very handy feature if you receive a lot of ad material that doesn’t fit your spam filters, or someone who just won’t leave you alone. This feature runs on mobile devices, but it is also available on desktop computers. Just open the message in question and tap or click the down arrow next to the time stamp, then select “Block [sender’s name]” from the options. Now every message from this sender will automatically go to spam.
2. Include generic responses to save time answering.
Template replies are such a great feature that they should be part of the default Gmail suite of features, not in the Gmail lab where they currently reside. Think of it as a text extension for email – and you know how much we love text extension . If you find yourself typing the same reply to different senders more than, possibly twice, standard replies can save you time .
Just set up a boilerplate response for a specific type of message you receive frequently, write what you say frequently as a response, and the next time you receive the same message, your response will be a few clicks away (and possibly , a little tweak Best of all, it runs in Google’s inbox , which has smart replies that try to predict what you say, and if you want it on the go, Gmail reply templates deliver them to you .
1. Try your inbox to keep things as simple as possible.
If you want to make your email look simpler and clearer, Google Mailbox might be the best option for you . It also simplifies the look and feel of your inbox, avoids clutter, and adds some useful organizational features like the aforementioned snooze, flagging, and prioritization, without having to use another app to do it all.
However, it sacrifices complexity for the sake of simplicity and tries to get a lot of features out of the way or hide them in the background so you can focus on cleaning up your inbox instead of messing with it.