Are you being as productive as you can be in Gmail? Feel like your inbox is out of control?
Well, this video is all about Gmail productivity. So get ready to spend less time in Gmail.
Hey friends! I’m Tasia Custode and welcome back to my YouTube Channel where I share tech tips,
app reviews, and a ton of Google Tips. Like seriously, it’s a ridiculous amount. Today,
we’re diving back into Gmail, but this time we’re going to help you get control of your inbox.
And no offense to Gmail - love you boo - but our time is valuable,
so isn’t it time we spent less time in Gmail? Ya, my thoughts exactly.
Gmail Tip number 1: Snooze email messages in order to take care of them later. It’s amazing
how many people don’t take advantage of this built-in feature. If you get easily distracted
like I do - squirrel - you’ll definitely want to take advantage of the Gmail snooze feature.
So, how many times have you received an email and you don’t have the time to reply right away,
or you’re working on something else and get distracted and forget to respond back?
Well, if you hover over the email in your inbox and click on the little clock icon that appears,
you’ll have the option to pick a time to snooze the email until. Meaning,
if you pick say, later this week, the email will pop back up to the top of your inbox
later in the week at that time. And yes, you can pick your preferred date and time too.
But you can also access the snooze feature from within an email itself. So, let’s say you’ve
opened the email, well, now your little snooze option is found at the top of the email message.
Now here’s what happens when you pick a date and time to snooze an email.
Let’s click on later today as an example,
and now look, the email is gone from the inbox. But do not panic. (panic face crossed out). Like
I said, the email will pop back into your inbox on that date and time chosen.
But, if you made a mistake and you’re like omg where did the email go
or wow look I stopped scrolling Instagram long enough to reply to that email,
well no worries, you can do that too before it’s popped back into your inbox.
Just take a little gander right here at the left-hand side of your inbox, and you may notice
the snoozed option. Simply click that option and voila here we go, we’ve got all our snoozed emails
right here. Plus, you’ll even be able to see on the right-hand side of the email list,
the times and dates the emails are scheduled to come back into our inbox.
And you can reply to any of these by just clicking on the email.
Or, you could even unsnooze the email right from here too by clicking unsnooze.
Gmail snooze has saved me so much time because I used to write down in my to-do lists any emails I
had to respond to and as more came in through the day, I’d stop what I was doing and make a little
note, but with snooze, I no longer have to do any of that.
And now onto Gmail Tip number 2:
Use Gmail templates! I’ve mentioned this one before in some of my other Gmail videos that you
can view via the links below, but I’m a big fan of templates and this is a massive Gmail timesaver.
If you haven’t used templates before, Click the settings gear icon and head to
all your settings. From here, head to the advanced section, and make sure you enable templates,
then click save changes. Now, every time you write an email, you can save it as a template,
or insert a previously saved template. So let’s say you compose an email that you send all the
time, like a job application, you can save it as a template by selecting the 3 dot menu icon
by the trash can, hover over templates, then choose to save as a template. Now when you go
to write that same email next time, you can head back to your templates in the compose window,
and this time select the template you want to insert. Of course, you can personalize
this template from the compose window here, but the rest of the work is already done for you.
And remember, if you’re finding these tips valuable so far, give this video a like
and subscribe to my Channel for even more Google goodness. Now on with
the Gmail productivity tip number 3: change your default
inbox view. This is going to be customized to whatever you find most productive.
So click on that gear icon again, and this time let’s pay attention to this right-hand side
quick settings panel, specifically, the inbox type section. Under the default option, which
is what I have here, you actually have the option to customize this if you want,
so you can select the tabs you want to display for you. But back in the quick settings,
maybe you function best when you have emails marked important pinned to the top of your inbox,
or maybe you only want unread messages at the top of your inbox, you can adjust all these
views right here. You can put starred first at the top, but one I think could be useful to help
save time in Gmail is the multiple inboxes setting. If you select the customize option here,
you can select up to 5 custom sections that you want to be displayed alongside your inbox.
Now, these sections are using something called search operators.
Which I talk about in the video titled
5 Gmail tips for productivity that I’ve linked to below, if you want to know more about that.
But what you can do is specify specific recipients or words in a subject line.
And if you’re wondering how the heck to use different search operators,
you can just click on learn more and then in this popup,
click on search criteria, and here’s a list of all different kinds of search operators you can use.
And moving on to maybe one of my favorite Gmail tips of all time:
create task specific email addresses by simply adding a plus symbol to your Gmail address.
This is going to blow your mind. Here’s how this works and why you’re going to want to do this.
If you don’t want to create multiple accounts or aliases for say,
email newsletter signups or when creating a new account on a brand website,
you can simply add a plus symbol to the end of your email address right before the @ symbol.
So let me break this down for you.
This is a test Gmail account I set up to show you this. The email is tasiacustodetest@gmail.com.
But say I’ve got to create an account on a website in order to access, I don’t know,
a white paper I want to download, what I can do is add on to this email address
so that I could then filter out these emails in the future
and see who is using the specific email I create. So let’s pop over to another account of mine.
And let’s pretend I’ve signed up for a digital white paper online and I gave this email address
to that marketing department. But instead of tasiacustodetest at gmail dot com, let’s say I
gave them tasiacustodetest+digitalmarketing and then I’ll add the rest of my email address at
gmail dot com. So again, pretend you’ve signed up for a newsletter or whatever it is,
you can add whatever works for your organization to the end of your existing email address. So,
magically I will finish writing the fake email that someone is sending, and I’ll hit send.
Now let’s head back to my test email account, that remember is only my name then test at gmail.com,
and would ya look at that, here is an email in my inbox from the fake marketer. If we open it up,
boom, we can tell that the email address they sent to was the digital marketing one I signed
up for the fake white paper with, but it’s come straight to the email account that I want.
I didn’t have to create a new email account. Remember you can put whatever you want in here.
Whatever works for you. So, now, you could filter any emails sent to this
address with the plus digital marketing or plus newsletter or whatever it is that you’ve created.
Which brings me to our last Gmail productivity tip: create filters. Specifically, create
filters that enable emails to skip the inbox. This is going to help keep your Gmail inbox organized
and allow you to spend less time sorting out emails as they hit your inbox.
Instead, sort them out before they even arrive. Here’s how.
There are a couple of ways to do this, but using our example from the previous tip,
let’s say I want all emails that have the tasiacustodetest+digitalmarketing@gmail.com
to skip my inbox and go to a label instead. Well, from the search bar at the top,
let’s click on ‘show search options’ to the right. Now, since I’m creating a filter where
I want to filter out emails to that specific email I created, I’m going to put that in the to field.
And because I happen to want to filter all of those email out, I’ll just click on create
filter. So now, here’s where it gets interesting. We can pick from a myriad
of things we’d like to happen when a message matches the criteria we just set. For this,
I could choose to have it skip the inbox completely which would archive it immediately.
Which by the way, is a good option if you get inundated with
junk to that task-specific email you create.
But what I recommend is to leave the skip the inbox toggled on, but also toggle on the option
to apply the label. Now here, you can choose from labels you may have already created or you
can create one right now from here if you don’t have one created yet. Then, if you have other
emails that match that criteria, you can toggle on the apply filter option here at the bottom,
so that it will filter all other existing emails like this one. Then just click on ‘create filter’.
And now, you will see that message that was sent to the task specific address I made up,
is now gone from my inbox, and not only that,
but we’ve got the digital marketing label I created now in the left panel,
and if I click on that label, there is the email we just filtered. Bingo bango, it’s that easy.
And now that you can spend less time in Gmail, perhaps you can spend more time
watching my other videos? (Wink) I have a ton of other Gmail videos that go over, well,
anything you could think of and more. And they’re all listed for you in the description below.
So, what did you think of these Gmail productivity tips? What are your
favorites? Let everyone know in the comments below. As always, thank you so much for watching,
if you liked this video, I want to know so give it a like, a share, or leave that comment below.
You can click right about here to subscribe to my channel and right about here and here
for even more Gmail content. Thanks for watching and see ya next time.