You've got a million messages in your inbox. Here's how to ninja your way out of the pile.
If you hate email and want to spend less time dealing with it, then over the next few days I’m going to show you some Gmail hacks to make life easier on you and the people you communicate with, all without changing your daily email habits.
When Gmail launched in 2004 it had three big innovations: storage size, conversation view, and labels. For most people, those eight-year old features continue to be enough. Over the years Gmail’s storage capacity has grown from 1 GB to 10 GB, conversation view has become more conversational, and they’ve dragged us kicking and screaming into using labels.
Gmail's latest major innovation, Priority Inbox, is the 21st century cotton gin: a revolution in unitized automation saving countless hours of menial work separating the wheat from the chaff. If you don’t want to read the rest of this article, my suggestion for how to best improve your email life in one click is by enabling Priority Inbox. By doing so, you get a cleanly segmented inbox with a more relevant unread count that frees you from email ennui. The only thing that could be better and more simple than Priority Inbox would be a sentient inbox: email that reads and responds to itself.
That said, I don’t actually use Priority Inbox. I know, I know, I just talked about how great it is. And it is! If you’re looking for a turnkey solution to email desperation, that’s absolutely what you want. But for me, I want a less automated, more artisanal email experience where I handcraft my own inbox to suit my particular needs.
What if it cost you a penny every time you clicked on something in Gmail? It’d add up fast. But seriously, every pointless distraction or unnecessary action is a tax on your valuable time. So what’s the best way to manage unimportant emails? By not seeing them in the first place.
If you’re Tim Ferriss or one of his followers then that means sending obnoxious autoresponders letting people know what email rules you have set up for yourself and how they might want to change their email practices to accommodate you. But if you’re part of the 99 percent of people who aren’t narcissistic assholes looking to alienate everyone they know, then the onus is on you to come up with a system to deal with whatever comes at you.
Your best friend for dealing with unimportant emails is Gmail’s filters. If you’re new to filters here are the basics: you set up rules in Gmail so that if certain conditions are met, then different things happen to your email. In the recent redesign, Gmail has made it harder for people unfamiliar with filters to create them: either click on the little down arrow next to the blue search button or, when selecting an email, pick “Filter messages like these” from the “More” dropdown.
