Steve Dotto here.
Today, I’m going to talk to you about Gmail and getting more productivity out of Gmail.
Now there are a lot of tips online about how to organize your folders and different practices
you can do within Gmail that will help you become a little bit more efficient and we
should strive to be more efficient in our email software because that’s where we spend
so much time.
I want to show you something today a little bit more off the beaten path.
Now for years, Google has tried out new features in something called Google Labs.
We used to find it right on the Google landing page.
We’d click on Labs and it would show us all the different skunkwork things that they
were working on that we could install in our different Google applications.
Lately, Google has hidden that away.
It’s not quite as loud and proud anymore.
A lot of people think it’s disappeared but it’s still a great place to go to find additional
functionality that you can add to your accounts or to your services like Gmail.
This is how you go about finding it.
Just open your Gmail account in your browser and then if you go into your General Settings,
you can find Google Labs available as one of the menu items.
When we click on that, they tell us right away it’s some crazy experimental stuff
and they put a disclaimer saying sometimes stuff disappears, sometimes stuff doesn’t
work, sometimes stuff doesn’t work the way it’s supposed to, and just be aware of that.
Now all of the different Google Lab stuff that I used has actually worked pretty well.
It doesn’t always work exactly as they tell us here but it does usually work pretty well
and it’s so easy to enable and disable.
This is all you do.
If you want to use one of the tools, click on ‘Enable.’
If you decide that you don’t want to use it after a while, you can click on ‘Disable’
right within this menu.
So it’s really easy to enact it.
You just have to make sure that you scroll down to the very bottom and save your changes
at the very end.
Now these are the current ones that are available.
Now when you watch this video, there might be some different ones available than the
ones that I have listed here but some of the ones that are here have been pretty stable
for a long time.
Now these are the three that I use and I like.
One is Create a Document, one is adding a Google calendar kind of a widget to my email
so I can always quickly see my calendar, and the other is probably the most useful, Undo
Send.
Now I should point out Undo Send is for when you click Send and you immediately have sender’s
remorse.
You go, “Shouldn’t I have sent that?”
because you see a typo as it’s going out and you realized you didn’t finish the letter
that you’d thought you’d finished.
This allows you to quickly undo it.
You have about a five-second buffer to undo a send and you’d be surprised at how often
you decide to undo a send after you send it.
It doesn’t go out in the internet and retrieve it.
It stops it before it goes actually so it creates a little buffer for you.
Let me show you how these things act within my Gmail software.
This first one is a great example, Create a Document.
It doesn’t work exactly the way that it’s shown right here in the promotion within the
Google Labs area.
Now that just might be because of the way I’ve got my screen set up in Gmail.
I don’t know and I don’t really care.
It doesn’t work exactly the same but it does what I want.
Here’s how it works.
I’ve got an email and quite often as you’re working on emails, you want to archive them
in different ways.
You want to take the copy body of an email and you want to put it into a document.
Rather than having to go copy and paste, this works when I use this tool here in a new window
to reply to an email, I have the ability to create a document from that.
So although I’m not actually sending the reply, clicking the ‘Reply’ button allows
me to open it in a new window first and then create a new document.
When I create a new document, it creates a Google doc or now a Google Drive document
of all the content of that email so it’s a great way for you to archive and copy stuff
into a document that you want to work on, save, and do something for a little bit later.
The next tip that I would like to show you is the calendar, adding access to your calendar
from right within your Gmail account.
You can always of course jump back and forth into the calendar just through the menu bar
by having another tabbed window open but if you look way down here at the very bottom
of my screen, we’ve got there a little bit of click that will allow me to different gadgets
in my side bar here and that is a real-time display of my calendar.
It’s useful as you’re going through emails, as you’re adjusting time and working with
people trying to figure out times for meetings and that sort of stuff.
It’s just a little nice and simple addition that I think is a no-brainer to incorporate
within your Gmail software.
The third thing is the sender’s remorse button.
I enable it and now let me show you what happens.
I’m just going to reply to the email that I created here.
It’s going to reply to myself so if I mess up it’s no big deal.
Now you have to watch quickly.
I’m going to click send and my option for not sending this message is going to appear
right here in the middle of my screen.
I’ve written some pithy reply to something.
I’ve spelt something wrong and as I click send, I go, oh no, I made a mistake there.
Look, “Your message has been sent.”
Undo it, and it now has not been sent and I’m safe from embarrassment and possibly
worse.
A little bit of poking around in Google Labs is time well-spent.
Even if you just find one or two little tools that make your life a little bit more efficient,
it is well worthwhile.
Now I hope that you think watching this video has also been worthwhile.
If so, please give us some props.
Give us a like.
We do appreciate that and by all means, subscribe to the Dotto Tech channel.
We release one of these videos per week at minimum and we hope that you find them useful.
I’m Steve Dotto.
Thanks for spending time with me today.
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Steve Dotto03 Terrific Gmail Tips0December 8, 2012
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