It takes an ample amount of time to organize your Gmail Inbox, but we got few simple tips for you to make the process easy. An employee spends nearly 1/3rd of their office time on emails. As per statistics, while you stop to check for your email; it takes about 23 minutes to get your focus back. If you want to escape all this tedious process of finding out what email does, organizing your emails might be your best bet.
Here are few ways on how to organize your Gmail inbox
Place relevant emails on top
- A great way of organizing is to put all your relevant emails at the top, for example, the ones you marked as important or starred.
- Gmail gives you five options to organize.
- Open Gmail settings (the gear icon)
- Click on the dropdown next to inbox type.
- Default: The layout that is by default, the latest at the top.
- Important first: Predictions will determine which emails are important, then places them at the top.
- Unread first: This will display unread emails above all. This is helpful if you are using the read/unread as a to-do list.
- Starred first: This is for prioritizing the emails in your inbox. The starred messages appear first.
- Priority Inbox: Gmail learns the type of emails you most interact with and puts them at the top of your inbox.
Get rid of tabs you don’t use
- You don’t want all the five tabs in Gmail. Disable the ones you don’t use.
- Click on Settings.
- A dropdown menu appears, click on Configure Inbox
- Select the tabs you want to enable/disable.
Use the Labels to organize Gmail
- Stop writing emails for internal conversations
- Stop mailing things that can very well be done otherwise, use Email Notes instead. Notes are messages you can write to others; they will appear right next to the email thread you’re discussing.
Archive emails you wouldn’t need in the future
If you do not want to delete emails only because you might need them later, then just archive them. Archiving does not delete your email; it just removes the archived mail from your inbox. These are searchable too.
- Select an email you want to archive, look for the file-like icon at the top. Click on the icon.
Experiment using Gmail Advanced
The Gmail Advanced or as it was formerly known as Google labs, is a testing ground for Google. This feature that has been a part of Gmail Advanced for a long time, is known as Multiple Inboxes. It lets you create multiple panes, each designed to display a particular category based on email type/preferences.
Turn on Nudges
- Nudge is an algorithm that places emails at the top when a reply hasn’t been sent by you/recipient. There are two types of Nudges-
- Suggest emails to reply to Emails you forgot to respond to will appear at the top.
- Suggest emails to follow up on Sent emails you need to follow up on will appear at the top.
- You will be able to turn Nudges on/off under the “General” tab in your settings.
Star important messages
Though it might be a basic trick well known to almost everyone who uses Gmail, starring important mail always helps. Stars can be used for individual messages in a thread. Whereas Importance Markers are used for entire threads.
Reply to emails faster with Canned Responses
If you have to type out the same type of email replies to multiple customers, you should set up Canned responses. These are email templates that allow you to respond to emails with predetermined text. You will be able to enable templates from the ‘Advanced’ tab in Gmail settings.
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