14 DAY TRIAL // Email overload is as much of a problem today as it has always been in recent years. Those depending on Gmail to get through their work day, while receiving hundreds of messages, have to learn a few tricks and optimizations to ensure they do it efficiently.
There are plenty of tips and advices out there, but Google has provided a few pointers of its own to help users work through their emails, with the help of features and tools already available in Gmail.
"Gmail offers a ton of customization, and when you get hundreds of emails every day it’s crucial that you have it set up to process mail quickly and efficiently," Paul McDonald, a Product Manager at Google, wrote.
"Working on Gmail, I get asked all the time what settings and features I use to help me power through my mail. Rather than answer my friends and co-workers one by one, I thought I’d put it all into a blog post," he explained.
The most obvious tip is to enable Priority Inbox. The feature was introduced a few months back and it has been quite a big success since. If you haven't had time or simply didn't bother enabling Priority Inbox, you should definitely do it.
This way, the most important emails, determined by clever algorithms, are pushed to the front, enabling you to focus on the things that must be done and ensuring that you don't miss an important message because its buried among the more trivial ones.
Another Google tip is to expand the number of conversations displayed in your inbox. By default, only 25 are show, but you can go all to way to 100, by selecting the "Maximum page size" in the Gmail settings page.
Keyboard shortcuts are another time-saver that probably gets underused. While it may not seem obvious at first, hitting a key to move through the email list, archive conversations, send messages and so on saves up a lot of time, used frequently.
Power users have long learned that Gmail Labs is full of hidden gems. Indeed, there are plenty of tools and tweaks that can help you save time.
One feature suggested by Google is Inbox Previews which, aptly enough, displays a preview of the inbox while Gmail loads. While this usually takes only a couple of seconds at most, it's plenty of time to spot the messages you need to get to first.
Send and Archive is another Labs feature, again with a rather descriptive name. It adds a button that sends the email and archives the conversation with just one click.
The recently used Background Send is also a time-saver, while the email you're trying to send is being processed, you can get started on whatever you need to do next.
Finally, Auto Advance comes in handy when moving through a lot of conversations. When you delete, archive, or mute a conversation, you move directly to the next one rather than back to the inbox.