Seven Ways to Improve Gmail Performance
Working with email isn’t the most fun way to pass the time, so most of us strive to access our inboxes as quickly as possible, and over the years, Gmail has continued to add more and more features. to help achieve this goal.
Try some of these tricks and see if they help reduce the time you spend in Gmail. From making emails more efficient to giving you a better overview of the messages you deal with, you should find at least some of them useful.
Convert emails into tasks
Google Tasks is built right into Gmail on the web via a right sidebar that you can open or hide with one click. If you need to quickly turn emails into a task, it’s easy to do: After opening the email or selecting one or more emails in the list, click the Add to Tasks button at the top (it looks like a checkmark in a circle). .
The email will be added to the Google tasks list you last used (you’ll notice there’s an email task list if you need it). If it’s not already open, the Google Tasks sidebar will appear, allowing you to edit the details of the new task and, if necessary, add a time and date. A link to the email in Gmail is also built into the task.
The new entry then acts like a regular task: you can mark it as completed, move it between lists, and add a subtask. This is a useful way to remember emails that you actually need to do something about.
Mark important emails
Gmail will do its best to determine which emails are most important based on various signals . This is then used to determine which emails will appear in the Priority tab in the default view, and can also help with notifications on mobile devices as you can turn off alerts for less important messages.
To help the Gmail algorithm, you can click the importance marker next to the email title to mark it as important or unimportant – it’s a small arrow that may already be shaded yellow to indicate importance (if it’s already shaded, hover over it ). to find out why the email was marked as important).
Over time, manually flagging emails like this should mean that Gmail will get better at determining which emails have the highest priority, meaning you’ll have to spend less time sifting through messages that don’t really need much attention.
Show more chats on screen
File this under “simple but effective.” Click the gear icon in the top right corner of the Gmail interface, select View all settings , and open the General tab. Next to the “Maximum Page Size” option, you can change the number of conversations displayed on the screen at once from 10 to 100.
Which end of this spectrum is best for you depends on whether you prefer to focus on a few emails at a time or take a more complete overview of what you’re dealing with, but increasing or decreasing the number can make a big difference. Gmail performance.
Increase the cancellation time
Gmail’s “undo send” feature is one of the email client’s most useful features, saving you from sending emails with missing attachments and obvious typos, not to mention protecting you from much more serious mistakes. Most importantly for our purposes, this means you won’t have to redo or follow up on emails as often.
You may want to give yourself a little more time to get the email back, beyond the default five seconds (which is not a lot of time). Click the gear icon in the top right corner, then select View all settings . On the General tab next to “Cancel sending ”, increase the timer to 30 seconds, which will give you a full half a minute to receive the outgoing message.
Get hints about old letters
It’s hard to avoid artificial intelligence in our apps and gadgets these days, but Gmail has been using basic artificial intelligence in our inboxes for years. One way to use this technology is to identify emails to follow up on, which Google calls “nudging.”
You can turn this feature on (or off) by clicking the gear icon (top right), then View all settings and then the General heading. Next to Tips, you can bring to your attention both incoming and outgoing emails that you might need to review – these emails will again appear at the top of your inbox, with suggestions next to them.
Enable automatic promotion
This is one of those small changes that can make a big difference: if you click the gear icon (top right) and then View All Settings , you’ll find the Automatic Transition feature under the Advanced tab. Turn this on, and when you delete, archive, or mute a conversation you’re in, you’ll jump to the next or previous message in the current view rather than the main conversation list.
This means you can process a bunch of emails in a row faster. To set up automatic forward or backward movement in time, find the Auto Advance option in the General tab of the Settings screen.
Drag emails between tabs
By now, you’re probably already familiar with the tabs that Gmail displays in the default view, which you can customize by clicking the gear icon (top right) and then selecting Customize under Default. For example, you get a Main tab for your most important emails and a Social tab for social media-related emails.
What you might not know is that you can drag and drop emails between these tabs: Just long-press on an email and then drag it to the tab header. Not only will this improve Gmail’s algorithms in terms of which emails go where, but you’ll also get a prompt asking if you want to apply the same sorting rule to emails from that sender in the future.