Take Control of Your Inbox with These Gmail Tips
Do you ever feel like your inbox is running your life? Try these Gmail tips & tools to stay organised (and sane)!
We’ve all had those days where it feels like the emails are streaming in faster than we can physically send them out, and where you feel like you’ve spent an entire day getting bogged down in the swamp of ‘little requests’ and not got anything of importance done.
But it doesn’t have to be this way - going through your emails shouldn’t be a task that makes you feel sick with stress and overwhelm.
I have a few tips to share with you on how I manage my inbox so that I feel in control. Most days I hit the mythical ‘inbox zero’, because I have the tools and a streamlined process to help me do this.
Labels / folders
First things first is the actual organisation of your emails; it still shocks me how many people simply have just an ‘Inbox’, ‘Sent’, ‘Drafts’ and ‘Deleted’ as their email set up! When I first met my partner Alex, his email software looked like this and he had around 20,000+ emails just sat in his Inbox, rather than being filed away into an organised system.
It’s really easy to create folders and subfolders to file your emails away into; in Gmail they’re also known as ‘Labels’ and ‘Sublabels’. You can create them easily from your sidebar, or from in Settings.
My email filing system looks like this; I have a ‘Label’ (aka folder) for each of my brands/businesses (because all of my emails for my different email addresses come into one inbox), and within each ‘Label’ (aka folder), I have ‘Sublabels’ (aka subfolders) for the different areas of my business, so I can easily search through the right area when I’m looking for something.
Why this helps:
By filing things away into organised systems like this, not only can you find things more easily, but as you drag and drop your emails from your inbox into these labels, they disappear from your inbox, making it clearer and less overwhelming.
I personally keep my inbox only filled with items that I need to act on, and file everything that’s complete away.
Gmail Response Templates
In Gmail, you can create a range of pre-written responses and email templates that you can insert into any email and customise to the right the person. Since setting these templates up this has saved me SO MUCH TIME! I cannot stress this enough 👏🏼
If you find yourself regularly writing out the same things over and over in your emails; whether it’s onboarding messages to clients, or product information to customers, I urge you to try this out. Just go to Settings > Advanced, and ‘enable’ Templates.
Why this helps:
You will not believe the amount of time this can save you! And less time writing out emails = more time to focus on client work and things you actually enjoy doing.
Schedule emails for later
I used to use a Chrome extension called Boomerang for this, but recently discovered that you can do this directly with Gmail without even needing a third-party tool! When you write your email, instead of clicking ‘Send’, click the arrow next to it and an option to schedule your email for the future will appear. You can choose tomorrow, next week, or any date & time of your choice.
Why this helps:
Sometimes I end up working through my emails in the evening or at a weekend, which is fine because that’s how I’ve chosen to organise my time, HOWEVER, chances are I probably do not want my clients to know that I am currently online (or I’ll get stuck in a back-and-forth when I really just wanted to tick a few things off my to do list quickly), and it’s important that you don’t train your customers that you often work evenings and weekends - or they will expect you to reply at any time.
So when I work at these times, I schedule my emails to be sent out in the morning or in the week, at a time when I am happy for clients to respond and start a conversation with me.
Track views & opens with Streak for Gmail
Streak is a paid extension for Gmail that you can install and it helps you manage leads and pipelines etc. if you choose to manage this within your emails. However, they do have a free plan where you can use a few of their features, including the ability to track opens so you can see if someone has read your email.
Why This helps:
This can help with your follow up process if you are sending pitches or proposals to be people, and you want to know whether they’ve received and looked at your message.
Image via Streak
‘Inbox Pause’ by Boomerang
I mentioned Boomerang above as the tool I used to use to schedule emails to send later, but they also offer an ‘Inbox Pause’ feature on their free plan. This allows you to temporarily stop mail from coming into your inbox, and you can set a time for when it’s allowed to come in again too.
Why this helps:
If you’re trying to do some ‘deep work’ on an important project, or something that needs your full attention but you keep getting distracted by emails, this feature can give you some quiet time without distractions. It’s easier than having to install and uninstall and app all the time, that’s for sure!
Easy unsubscribe
I personally find it really annoying that when you want to unsubscribe from marketing emails from a company you have to scroll to the end of the email, basically use a magnifying glass to find where they’ve hidden the ‘unsubscribe’ link in minuscule writing, click the link and click another button or two on a landing page that’s full of sad-faces and pressure to stay subscribed etc etc.
Luckily in Gmail you don’t have to go through all this, you can easily just click the automatic ‘unsubscribe’ link that appears at the top of the email next to the sender’s address.
Why this helps:
Save time scrolling through marketing emails and quickly clear clutter from your inbox.
Undo accidental sends
You know that gut-wrenching feeling when you realise you just clicked send on an email where you’ve left in the [***] dummy text, or worse - called someone the wrong name or sent to the wrong person?
Panic-no-more! Simply head over to Settings > General, and scroll down until you see the Undo Send area. Here you can select how many seconds you have for that ‘undo’ button to hover over the top of your inbox after you’ve hit send (up to 30 seconds).
Why this helps:
I mean if you know the feeling I mentioned above, you’ll get why this is a life saver!
Take Gmail offline
Have you ever been on a flight or somewhere with no internet, but with time to spare that you just wish you could spend working through your inbox? Try the ‘Gmail Offline’ add-on! When you are about to go offline, head to Settings > Offline, and enable offline mode. It will then ask you how many days worth of messages you want to save to your computer to access while you have no internet. Click save and allow it to sync for a minute or so.
Then once you’re without internet, you can head back to Gmail in your browser and still access all your emails without having the internet to load them. If you reply to any, they will stay in your Outbox and send automatically once you have internet again.
Why this helps:
Be productive even when you’re not connected! (Although obviously I advocate for the fact that you don’t ALWAYS need to be filling your time with emails, and perhaps time without the internet could be spent doing something more enjoyable ☺️)
Create follow-up tasks (with GOogle calendar or Trello)
If you’re a Google Calendar user, I’d recommend looking into ‘Google Tasks’! This tool can help you create to-dos and reminders that are linked to your Google Calendar, but that also can be linked to your Gmail emails too. When you have an email open and you want to create a reminder for yourself to follow someone up, or do something that the email is asking, simply select the email, click the ‘…’ more dots at the top of Gmail and select ‘Add Task’. This will open your Google Tasks where you can edit the reminder.
Or are you a Trello user? If so you can do the exact same thing but send your email tasks and to-dos (and even full email threads) straight to your Trello boards! You’ll first need to go to Settings > Get Add-ons, and select Trello. Then in your right-hand bar, click the Trello icon, and open an email in Gmail. It will ask you to log in, and then automatically ask you what Board and what List you’d like to add this task/email thread to.
