Your Gmail Archives Need to Be More Organized

The idea of ​​declaring a mailbox “bankruptcy” is not new. Simply deleting or archiving all your old emails and starting a new process has been something many of us have been waiting for for years . Personally, I advocate archiving over deleting, but even that can create some clutter—you’ll have to go through all your archived emails if you want to find something specific. But you can make things easier by organizing your inbox with Gmail labels.

Create Gmail labels for specific time periods

This trick is inspired by Liz Gumbinner of Cool Mom Tech , who says you should put all your emails in Gmail labels that correspond to the year they were received. This is a great way to stay at inbox zero, but I think we can take it a step further.

First, here’s what it suggests: Find every item currently in your Gmail inbox by typing “in:label:inbox” into the search bar. Click the “select all” checkbox in the top left corner to highlight every message in your main inbox. From there, you’ll get a pop-up asking if you want to “select all” conversations; click yes. Then create a new label (not a folder) and give it a year: “Inbox 2022,” “Inbox 2023,” etc. Gumbinner suggests adding an asterisk to the most recent or current year label so it stays level with the top of the sidebar.

By doing this, you’ll quickly tag each email in your inbox with a year, so by clicking that label in the left column, you can edit them all at once. By selecting them all, you can easily archive them in one go, but they will retain their labels, so you can always search emails in your archive by year they were received.

Taking this method one step further

I like this method because it keeps the archive more organized and helps you find emails from specific years, but it can be even more useful if you get more granular with your labels. I decided to do mine quarterly instead of just yearly and it wasn’t hard.

After typing “in:label:inbox” into the search bar, I opened the “Anytime” drop-down menu at the top of the page and clicked “Custom Range…”. I entered January 1, 2023 as the start date and March 31, 2023 as the end date, then follow the same procedure above to create a label called “2023 Q1.” From there, I opened a new shortcut on the left side of the page, selected everything in it, and clicked Archive. Obviously this creates four tags for each year instead of one, but it’s useful because it gives you a general idea of ​​when you received a particular email.

Of course, you can also create additional labels based on the content of emails—for example, a label for emails about my part-time job teaching spin classes, emails about my research internship, and emails from family and friends. But that left too much room for some (like PR pitches or one-off threads about independent projects) that might slip through the cracks and end up in my inbox. If you’re aiming for zero inbox, it’s best to sort labels by time blocks, but you can mess around with custom time and content settings to create labels that best suit your specific email trends.

The goal is to simply create smaller chunks of emails to keep your archive organized, rather than just stuffing all your emails into the junk mailbox and praying you can find them again if and when you need to .