Hey everyone, Michael here. Today, I want to talk to you about how to organize Gmail and get
to inbox zero. When I worked at Google, I would routinely receive 200 to 300 emails a day. And
let's be honest, no one can stay on top of that amount of email. With this system, I'll ensure
you never miss a follow-up and you'll always be able to track your responses. Let's check it out.
When you look at your inbox, emails generally fall into one of three categories. Follow-up,
awaiting response, and need to read. First, let's go set up some labels. Here we are inside of the
inbox of Gmail. As you can see, I have a lot of unread emails, and one of the first things
I want to do is split these up into those three categories we talked about, which are follow-up,
awaiting response, and to read. In order to do that, I'm first going to need to create labels
over here on the left side. I'm going to hit this plus button to do so. The first label that I'm
going to want to create here in the label prompt is the label for follow-up. And one little trick
that I like to do is I like to use the brackets on my labels so that it ensures Gmail always keeps it
at the top of the labels list, even if everything becomes alphabetized. I'm going to go ahead and
hit Create. I don't want to nest it under any other labels, which means sort of bury it under
another label. So this is the action I want to take. Now that I've created the follow-up label,
which we can see over here on the left side, I'm going to want to follow-up on that follow-up label
by creating another one. Next, we're going to do the awaiting response label, same thing as last
time, hit the Create button. The final label we're going to create is the one for to read,
also create. Now that we've created our three labels on the left here, we can see awaiting
response, follow-up, and to read. A nice touch that I think really helps things stand out is
to colorize them. And later when we set up multiple inboxes, you'll see why this really
helps. To colorize your labels, just move your cursor directly to the right of them, click these
three little dots, select in there, and hit Label Color. For awaiting response, I personally always
loved orange. For follow-up, I like yellow. And for to read, since it's not that urgent,
I didn't like a really bright or hot color, I just went with a light blue. Now that we have
our labels all set up and nicely colorized, let's move over to the Settings section so we can add
something called Multiple Inboxes. Click the gear icon to bring up all of the settings available in
Gmail. What we're going to want to do now is scroll past all of these settings you see here
down to something called Multiple Inboxes. We're going to click on this, and then we will also hit
Customize. Now that we've hit the Customization button for multiple inbox sections, we are brought
to this beautiful area where we can decide to break up the monolithic inbox of Gmail, which just
goes on and on, into five distinct sections. So, the first section we're going to create here is
the one about awaiting response. In order to name one of our sections into awaiting response, we're
going to have to type in label colon, and then the bracket Awaiting Response, and then end bracket.
It's important to use the exact characters we use to make the label in order for Gmail to
recognize that we want to use the label. Next, we're going to want to enter in a friendly name.
We're going to repeat that step two more times, once for follow-up and once for to read. Now
that we have filled in all of the sections label headings, we can move down and tinker with any of
the other settings we'd like to. Personally, I do not want to change anything from the default
settings, but there is one that I do want to change, which is the multiple inbox position. I
personally like to have that to the right of the inbox because it is easier for me to process and
look at. If you want to put it above the inbox or below the inbox, that's completely up to you.
Next, and finally, we are going to hit save changes to make sure that everything is kept
the way we want it. Now that we've saved all of those settings for multiple inbox,
we come back to the standard Gmail inbox and we can notice some changes. Over here on the right,
we have our three buckets, awaiting response, follow-up, and to read. This is really where we
get to start using these buckets. So now you can see over here, I have a whole inbox just waiting
for me to read through and I want to chunk this up nicely so I know what to do with them. So one
of the first things that catches my eye is this email about customer feedback received,
and it says action required. So I'm going to go ahead and right click on this and use label
as and put follow-up to it. And look at that, it moves directly over into our bucket called
follow-up. Now that we've moved Lee's email over into follow-ups, I'm going to go back and check
my inbox to see what else is in there that might be worth looking at. I see here that there is an
internal newsletter. I've kind of been hearing some buzz about this. I'm going to check on it.
Okay, this looks like something that I might want to read later. So I can also,
from this very screen, add a label and move it to the to read section. Now that I've marked
this one as to read, I'm going to go back out to my inbox to see what else there is.
I see something from Lynne about delivery not working as planned.
Nope, this is Comic Sans. I'm not going to read this one right now. It's too much too early in
the morning, so I'm going to go back out. Then there's this one where it says end of message. Can
you work this weekend? Well, that's a bit cryptic, so I'm going to actually reply to this. Now that
I've followed up with Patti and asked her to provide more context before I work this weekend,
I want to make sure that I have some idea as to why she wants me to work this weekend, so I'm
going to await her response. So, I'm going to go up here to the label and hit Awaiting Response.
Now you can see as we're back in the general inbox area, we have three sections,
each of which is filled up with email. So the first one is Awaiting Response, which means I
am just waiting for someone to get back to me and I do not have any action required. After that,
there is one email in Follow Up, which means I do have to do something and this really keeps me
on track throughout the day that I have something to do. Finally, I have one in the To Read bucket,
which ultimately could be considered the least important bucket, but I do want to highlight
that there is something for me to read in the future if I have the time to get to it. Now I'm
going to go through and categorize the rest of my messages in my inbox. Now that I've gone through
and processed all my email and moved them into the appropriate sections or buckets, I want to clear
out my inbox to get down to inbox zero. So what I want to do now is go up here and say Select All
and then find this little arrow archive button and hit it. Now we have the most beautiful of sites,
a complete inbox zero. This frees up our mental space to deal with anything that we have left
in the Follow Up section. Earlier today, I spoke with Lynne offline and so I know we do not need
to follow up with this Pigeon Delivery email anymore, so I'm going to click the little X on
this Follow Up label to get rid of it. After removing the Follow Up label, I can see that
it no longer exists in the Follow Up section and it is also not in the Inbox section. Now
that we've cleared out the inbox, I want to show you a couple of other little tricks that you can
do over here on the right-hand side. First, you can expand and collapse these if they're ever too
much for you to look at. If you want to prioritize one type of email over another within a section,
you can always use a little star icon. And if you ever have too many emails that you feel you need
to read at once, you can go into a dedicated view by clicking on these numbers. I know sometimes
Gmail can feel a bit daunting as one long list, but I hope that this system has helped you get
control of your inbox a little more. If you have any other tips or great ideas, please share
them in the comments below and please do consider subscribing and I will see you in the next video.