Don’t drown in email: How to use Gmail more efficiently

This is really great. Thanks for posting. Another necessary gmail tool is "Boomerang" http://www.boomeranggmail.com/ which allows you to control what time certain emails will go out. Great for 2am coding sessions where you want to send an email that will end up in someone's inbox at 8:30am but you know that you won't be awake to send it.

I don't understand why people are constantly acting like they are required to read email. I currently have over nine-thousand unread emails in my gmail. And look! Nothing bad happened! That's getting things done. Things that aren't email.

This is actually almost exactly my email flow. Multiple inboxes with filters so email gets assigned and put in its place quickly. Instead of stars I use labels though. Anything in my inbox I need to handle right away or mark as todo. Very efficient and keeps the inbox at less than 10 emails most of the time.

Combined with Gmail shortcuts, you can handle emails very quickly in Gmail. These features combined are the main reason why I never give more than a cursory glance at all these slick new email apps since this workflow is so quick and easy for me.

Neat hack, I've got something similar setup!

Just as an editing comment: You'll want to change "loose" to "lose" in the article. It's an easy one to mess up!

I had no idea Gmail had multiple "stars". Thank you for this!

Fantastic, just set my inbox up using this. So excited.

One other hack idea:

If you use your android phone to send reminders ('Note to Self' voice command)

You can set up a filter for mails with Subject:"Note to self" Apply label 'yellow-bang' Skip: inbox

It saddens me to see efforts on getting people even more hooked on gmail.

Being obsessed with productivity I would say sanebox.com is a must have and coupled with the boxer iOS app it truly is the best email solution I have used in the past 20 years. I hate to pay for service in an arena where most is free but the cost of sanebox is worth it to me. I don't work or know anyone at the company so this is truly a not bias recommend. I have zero inbox and a killer reminder capability built in. Btw - sanebox did what online service companies "should" do, same as 37signals, they offer a service worth paying for, and don't need to get acquired to make money, only sell their service for a price people are willing to pay - seems like a solid biz plan, eh?

I use the mailbox iPhone app. The killer feature for me is that I can snooze an email. It's close to ideal for me. This ability to show multiple inboxes on the desktop might be an interesting tool to add visibility to something on another list.

I find it sadly amusing to see people enamored with yet another prop for Gmail workflow, when just a few months ago we learned that our Gmail is being casually read by NSA, likely with Google's knowledge and assistance.

looks like my email flow except i'm using a fat client and no gmail. (thunderbird in my case).

i never understood people not doing "zero" inbox and not sorting mail automatically. they're always complaining. email never took me much time and i get about 1K a day. Obviously I don't read 1k a day. Nobody does.

in my case starring = queued for later replies, probably evening or next morning = todo list, or whatever you wanna call it.

inbox = disruptive messages, rare.

some mailboxes = phone alert on new mail (super important stuff, rare)

other mailboxes = sorted archives, stuff i may peruse when it comes in if ive some time/interest.

works fine.

This is very similar to the workflow I use with gmail. I use a slightly different means to achieve it though, I use Active Inbox (http://activeinboxhq.com) which is a plugin for Gmail. It helps with GTD stuff by giving "Statuses" such as Action, Waiting On and Some Day to messages (they're just labels underneath but it gives them a nice UI) and I use it to display my actioned messages next to my inbox via a feature called Radar.

That's all well and good but so far it's only what the author has done (but with, IMHO, a nicer and easier to use UI). What Active Inbox does that isn't possible without a plugin is it adds notes and "next steps" to emails, it's easiest to explain with a screenshot:

http://awesomescreenshot.com/08225ii5e9

Full disclaimer: I have been paid to add features to Active Inbox (including some of the ones I've mentioned and very cool upcoming keyboard control thingy) but I was a happy customer before that happened.

Very cool workflow. I also use Gmail extensively as my primary task management platform and have a simple workflow that works great for my needs. I wrote about it here: http://www.manuelflara.com/ultimate-todo-list-inbox/

Its too bad this actually makes things worse if you are a heavy mobile user. Since all emails are archived (even those awaiting todo/reply) using this workflow on mobile now requires quite a few navigation points just to see these emails.

In my opinion multiple inboxes leaves the screen looking cluttered anyway.

I've found that I've done pretty well with the default organization of the Primary/Social/Promotion etc. tabs. Since you can mark any tab as completely read at once, I just keep my todos unread in my Primary tab. A simple search for is:unread displays what I need to work on.

Very nice hack, Andreas. I've set it up per your instructions and I will commit to using it.

One thing... the multiple inbox feature doesn't appear to work on the iPad Gmail app. My inbox is simply empty... and I don't see the additional inboxes anywhere. Just an FYI for those who go this route.

You don't need to enable auto-archive if you learned all the keyboard shortcuts: [ and ] are 'remove from current view and go to next/previous', which removes the email from the inbox if that's where you process mail. ( or { } to explicitly archive from any view)

I've been on a recent email organization kick. I spent last week setting up aliases and filters to keep junk out of my inbox.

Basically I set up an alias for each newsletter I subscribe to then went and either change my email for those accounts or unsubscribed then resubscribed with the new alias.

Then I created a label for each newsletter/whatever I was expecting and set it to "Show if unread". Next I created the filter, I put in the "to" email address of the alias, then set the filter to auto archive and apply the label for that newsletter.

That way it doesn't pop up in my inbox but if there's an unread message it does appear in my left hand label list.

Then I can get to it when I want and process it at that time. That helps keeps important items in my inbox that I can process more quickly.

This is fantastic. I have used the same system for the last 4 years and it is the single most useful productivity "hack" in my life. The only change I use is that my reference emails usually go into Evernote.

Kudos for such a useful and comprehensive post!

I remember a time (2005) when GMail was hailed as the future of easy to use email. However, I must say, this thing has grown into the most convoluted thing I've ever worked with and I'm not really sure why this is...

Excellent. I could see myself using this (especially nowadays that screens are big enough).

Before clicking the link I was afraid this wouid be about "Priority Inbox" or any other way to let Google categorize my email for me, which I don't trust them to do other than the spam filter.

Lately, however, the constant UI changes are driving me into thinking about moving from web-based GMail to some other, more stable alternative for reading email. (Really, I'm even considering adopting a terminal client like mutt. At least I know _that_ I'll be able to keep using exactly the same way 10 years from now.)

Amazing :-) I had a simple question unrelated to post - how is it that there is no ad shown to you on gmail ? Are you using any extension to remove ads ?

The only thing lacking here is the ability to navigate multiple inbox sections with the keyboard.

I use a very similar system (in fact the same, just with different stars) and hitting g + s then using j/k to navigate messages is so much faster than using a mouse/trackpad. It feels sort of barbaric.

I suppose this view gives me a nice overview, I just wish there were a hotkey to move from box to box.

I rely a lot on filters & labels, mainly to delete unwanted mails (i rarely unsubscribe from a newsletter, just add a filter), but also to categorize and give states to some mails; I don't need more than one big view, and a clean menu (with hidden useless labels and opts...)

For those interested in trying this, it's worth noting that you'll need to disable some things like the tabbed inbox.

The step-by-step eventually mentions this, but until you get to that point you won't see any sign of the multiple inbox UI.

Is there a benefit to using stars instead of labels? I find the interface for applying/removing labels far quicker than clicking through the star options one at a time, and also that the labels are more accessible over mobile.

Awesome. Couldn't realize managing Gmail could be so simple and effective.

This has some nice tips, but seems overly complex. Try using the "Unread First" inbox, and simply mark email that you need to take action on as Unread, whether you've replied to it or not.

Seems Gmail tabs don't work with multiple inboxes, but I've set it up. I guess I'll have to be more liberal with unsubscribing without emails being sorted into tabs.

How do you get the todo list on the right side of the screen?

Thanks, always wanted my email to be a todo list

Very good setup n useful...

Use Mailbox - www.dropbox.com/mailbox