- So next up, I wanna take you guys through
some advanced settings for Gmail.
These are settings that are gonna boost your productivity.
And I've been using Gmail for a very long time now,
I've learned many of these little tricks along the way.
And I always have to shout out
to Mr. Carl Taylor from Automation Agency,
who taught me a number of the tricks
that are hidden away inside of Gmail.
I always give him credit,
because I love the course
that I went through of his many, many moons ago.
Now I wanna take you through some of the best features
that you can enable and switch on,
which are gonna help you boost your productivity.
Most people spend 10 to 20% of their time on email.
And I think that's just absolutely ridiculous.
I try and spend no more than about 10 or 20 minutes
in my inbox per day.
Usually, it's like a couple of minutes, I'm in and I'm out.
And if you're interested we have a whole course
on how to completely manage your inbox.
Completely dominate and get your inbox under control,
not out of control.
From out of control, to under control.
And that's included in Genius Academy.
And if you're interested in that,
you can jump on the link below
to check out our concierge membership
and get access to the full email course.
But I wanna share some of my best tips
here and kind of show you guys how they work,
where you will use them,
and why they are so darn useful for your Google inbox.
Let me go ahead and open up my inbox here.
So you can see I've got the new Gmail set up.
On the right hand side, I've got my calendar, which I love.
I've got my Google Keep there, I've got all my emails here.
I've got multiple inboxes
and multiple lists of email in my inbox.
I'm gonna share a little bit more about that upcoming,
so stay tuned for that.
You can see all of my chat is on the left hand side.
So I can see all the different rooms that I'm a part of,
I can see any individual one on one messages
for anyone who's messaged me as well.
And so the productivity view of Google inside of Gmail
has really made some big changes.
I really love what Google have done,
because they've just turned
this into a productivity powerhouse.
I no longer need to leave my inbox
to get a lot of other basic things done.
Like setting up a meeting,
or jotting down a quick note inside of Google Keep,
or chatting to one of my team members
if I've got something really urgent.
Now, I'm not suggesting we sit inside of Gmail all day long.
And I'm gonna show you a way to actually hide the inbox,
so you're not distracted by the inbox
in some upcoming content very shortly.
So we will get to that soon.
But first up, I want to take you through some
of the most basic settings that I always enable,
if I were to sit down in a brand new Gmail mailbox.
Now the settings wheel is really easy to access,
top right hand corner here, we just hit the Settings button.
And the first thing I do
is I like to switch it to compact mode.
Not only is that because I've kind of got good eyes,
and I can see more of the emails,
but I just like to see exactly everything
that I've got to work on in one place.
I don't wanna have to be scrolling
or going through multiple pages.
And I understand if right now you've got hundreds
or even thousands of emails in your inbox.
If that's the case,
then I would say you would be a good candidate
to check out our inbox management program,
inside of Genius Academy.
But first,
let's get it to compact
which is going to at least allow you to see
more of what's going on in your inbox.
Now the next thing I want you to switch on,
is the multiple inboxes pane here.
So instead of having important first or starred first,
or anything like that,
I want you to switch on multiple inboxes.
And multiple inboxes is what allows
me to have multiple lists of emails here.
So I can actually see multiple lists of emails,
and I can choose which emails I wanna have there.
Now the real magic of this is that I teach an inbox system
where you bring emails into your inbox and you triage them.
I want you to imagine,
everyday you probably go to your postbox
out the front of your house, your letterbox,
and you pull out the mail.
Whether you're in a house or an apartment, or whatever,
you go to your mailbox and you pull out all the mail.
And what do we do with that mail?
Well, we bring it into the kitchen,
and we put it on the kitchen table,
and we sort through it, right?
We take the junk mail out and we put it in one pile,
and then we probably put it in the recycling bin.
Any bills that need to be paid,
we probably pin them up on the fridge,
postcard from grandma don't get those that often anymore.
But we'll put them in another pile as well,
maybe somewhere nice.
And eventually we get to the bottom of the pile
and we have triaged all of those emails,
or physical mail messages.
Well, let's take that into the digital realm.
What do we do with our inbox?
Effectively, we leave all of the messages
inside our mailbox.
We don't actually triage them.
And so if you imagine if you walked
to the front of your house,
and you're opened up your mailbox,
and you had like a whole year of mail in there,
how would you know which of the new mail
was at the right spot?
How would you know which mail is important or not important?
How would you know if there's something urgent and pressing
that you need to actually get onto,
when maybe you're not fully paying attention
to everything that's there?
That's the problem with leaving emails inside your inbox.
And so the basics of what we teach in our course,
is for you to have multiple spaces
where you can triage your emails into.
And think of them as a digital version
of the kitchen counter, and the fridge,
and the desk where you put the postcards from Grandma.
All of those can be set up as labels.
And then when emails come into our inbox,
we're actually going to move them out of our inbox
and into those labels.
We're effectively gonna be triaging them,
and when we triage them,
it then makes them nice and easy to go back to
at the right time.
Now, do we want to leave the message
from grandma on the kitchen bench?
No.
We might leave it there for a couple of days,
but what's probably better to do is straight away,
put it up on the cork board, or I don't know,
post it up wherever you wanna post it,
the picture from Grandma.
So I'm gonna show you how to do that inside your Gmail.
So inside my Gmail,
you'll see here that I've got a label
called Peter to Action.
And that's pretty much the only label that I use.
Now previously, I've used multiple labels
for multiple actions.
I would have one label for pay bills.
I would have one label for delegate to team.
I would have one label for, stuff that needs a phone call.
I would have one label for, stuff that I need to reply to.
And basically, each one of these action labels
is a different bucket that I can put my emails in,
and effectively triage.
And along with a couple of other tricks,
you can triage your email each day or once or twice a day,
is probably when people are gonna be doing it.
And then you get your inbox down to zero
every time you do that triage.
Now there's seven steps to get to inbox zero.
I've just shared one of those steps,
check out the full course in Genius Academy
if you're interested.
But once you've set up your labels,
you'll now see that the Peter to Action label,
all those emails actually appear here,
right inside my inbox.
So if I open up the label,
you can see here I've got these emails.
And the first five of those emails
basically shows up above my inbox.
Now I set that up in the settings.
So in the settings here,
I just go to multiple inboxes, and then customize.
And that's where I can choose which labels,
I wanna have to appear in my inbox.
You'll notice here that I've also done the drafts label
and the starred label.
So anything I star is just automatically
gonna show up there in the inbox.
That's the kind of thing where,
if there's something important,
I can star it, and then I can archive it.
And it's also always just gonna appear
there in the starred list.
And we've got all of the others there as well.
So that's one of the most important features
that I can teach you guys about Gmail,
absolutely critical.
So now I wanna take you into some of the more,
some of the more kind of behind the scenes features.
And we're going to go into the actual settings for that.
So we click on Settings wheel,
and then we go to See all Settings.
Now inside the General tab,
there's a couple of really cool things that we can enable.
First up, you wanna make sure
you have send and archive enabled,
which basically means when you send an email,
you have the option to send and archive the email in one go.
What that means is you're replying to someone
rather than having to have a two step process,
you have a one step process, I really like that.
Make sure that you've enabled all of the AI features
inside of Gmail, likes grammar suggestions,
spelling suggestions, auto-correct, writing suggestions.
These are actually called smart compose,
where Google will help you write your emails for you.
Just make sure they're all basically turned on.
They are all excellent, excellent features.
But there's two things that I really wanna focus on here,
and that is to make sure
that you've got mail notifications switched off.
And also, oh, there's three.
You wanna switch off indicators,
and you wanna switch off snippets.
So let me tell you that again,
notifications off, indicators off snippets off.
Now, what these things do,
the snippets are basically the first few lines of the email,
it shows you what the first few lines are.
And the indicators are just like little arrows
that let you know,
like a level of personalization
on who's sent the email to you.
I think it's yeah,
if it's whether or not it's a mailing list,
or if it's just to you.
Now, the reason I recommend that you switch these off
is when you see the first few lines of an email,
what do you do?
Immediately, you wanna jump into that,
because you're curious about what it might be.
And one of the important things
that you need to know to keep your inbox tidy
and keep it down to zero every day,
is to triage your emails in a particular fashion.
And that particular fashion
is to work from oldest to newest sequentially,
one by one, until you've triaged all of them.
Now, if you imagine you've got all of your mail
sitting on the kitchen counter,
and you pick up that mail,
and as you're sorting it through, you go,
"Oh, this is a nice brochure.
"I'm gonna sit down and read the brochure."
Well, you're not gonna get through the rest of the triage
with the rest of the mail that's sitting there.
So the important thing is to actually
put it in the right piles or labels,
and then actually come back to it
and go through things one by one.
And so switching off snippets
is just a way to make that a little bit easier.
It's in an archive I'll explain that one.
And the indicators is just one that kind of annoys me.
I think there's another one that shows
the level of importance.
I have also have switched off that one as well.
So that's another one that I've got switched off.
Okay, cool.
We've got all those done.
The next one that I wanna to talk to you about
is called auto advance.
And this one is also in the General tab.
So auto advance.
I've got a feeling we have to switch it on first
in the advanced menu, and then it will appear here.
But what auto advanced does,
is it helps you with that triage.
It helps you actually,
after you're finished with an email,
whether you've either replied,
or archived or moved it to a folder,
it's actually gonna automatically
skip to the next conversation.
And so I have this set to automatically
go to the next newer conversation.
And every time I go into my inbox,
I go to the oldest email in the inbox,
and then I work through up to the newer,
newer, newer, newer, newer emails.
And that basically means that I'm never gonna have an inbox
that is older than a day old,
because I go in there and I just go
through and do my triage.
You can see here, the oldest email in there is 12:00 pm.
And so I would go into this email,
I don't need to do anything on this email,
I'm gonna archive it,
and it just automatically advances up to the next one.
I'll say yes to that invitation.
And I'll go archive,
automatically advances to the next one,
automatically advances to the next one, you get the idea.
And so bit by bit, it's helping us to rapidly
triage through our mailbox
and get through things really quickly.
I really, really love that one.
And so for switching that on.
So I go into my settings, I go to See all Settings,
and inside advanced.
Just make sure that one's enabled,
auto advance,
and then you will be able to access that feature.
After then it will appear in the General tab.
Cool.
So after all of that,
these are all kind of like built in features to Gmail,
there's one more absolutely amazing feature
that I wanna share with you,
but this is actually a third party plugin.
We've got other videos on the best plugins for Chrome
and the best plugins for Google,
but by far my favorite one for Gmail is this one.
It's called and you can't see it,
because it hides the inbox.
It's actually called Inbox When Ready.
And if you go to I think it's Inboxwhenready.com.
Let me say that again for YouTube.
Oh, geez, okay.
Try again, Inbox When Ready, see if I can find it.
Ah, .org, okay.
So if you go to inbox.ready
try that again.
If you go to Inbox.ready,
If you go to Inboxwhenready.org
you'll find this amazing plugin, which gets added to Gmail.
Now there is a free version, which is great,
but it does add that little tagline to your signature.
If you wanna pay for it for the year,
it gives you full control of the plugin,
and I would strongly recommend that.
But that little tool there allows me
to basically have the choice to go into my Gmail
and either do a search or compose an email,
or reply to a specific email,
or do something on my calendar, or chat to my team,
without being distracted by the inbox all the time.
And let me tell you, that is an absolute lifesaver,
because I'm never chained to the new emails
that are just coming into my inbox.
I describe email as like a fire hose
being pointed at your face.
It's completely overwhelming sometimes.
And unfortunately,
emails seems to be the to do list for the world
that ends up on your plate.
And so I'm really really, really diligent with my email,
not to let it control my life
and hopefully these tips will help you as well.
(bouncy music)