Manage Your Email Inbox Like a Boss 📧

Have you ever been in a situation where you just felt annoyed/scared to look at your inbox? Nowadays, we email for everything, which is good, But managing them is not easy.

Here are some cool tricks and techniques I use to make it easier for me.

Pre-Work

If you start managing it, these are things you will have to do first.

• Clear all the unwanted emails from your inbox. This might take hours, but it is worth it.
• Unsubscribe from all the unwanted promotion and marketing emails. Unsubscribe and not delete; if you delete it, it’s just going to keep coming.

Topics

• Priority Inbox
• Stared ++
• Label’s
• Pre-defined Responses
• Email Tabs

Priority Inbox

Once the Pre-work is done, This is the first thing to do.

Change how your inbox looks. Just listing all the emails together will not help much; let’s make it visually easy to understand what is what.

Before

Turn on priority inbox.

1. On your computer, go to Gmail.
2. To configure your inbox, go to the top right, then click Settings.
3. In the “Inbox type” section, select Priority Inbox.
4. To customize the priority inbox setting, click Customize.
5. Choose the inbox sections you want to show Save Changes.

After

I would recommend keeping things in this order.

• Unread
• Stared
• Everything else

But feel free to customize as you think fit.

Stared ++

So we all know the ⭐ icon in Gmail; we can use it in any email to mark them as Important. But did you know there are more icons like this available at your disposal?

There are 12 different icons you can use to categorize emails.

How to activate this:

Click the “Settings” button and select “Settings” from the drop-down menu. On the “General” tab, scroll down to the “Stars” section. Drag icons from the “Not in use” section to the “In use” section to add different types of stars. If you have more than one-star type in use, click the star icon next to email message cycles through all the stars in use. If you star a message while it’s open, only the first-star type is applied.

You can decide what the stars mean to you; this I what I do. -

• Yellow star: You have to work on these tasks.
• Question mark star: This needs the discussion with the person who has sent the email to take it forward.
• Exclamatory star: Follow up on this email.
• Red Star: you are going to be in deep **** if you don’t finish this today.

Label's

Labels are tags you can apply to email to categorize messages the way you want them to be grouped. For instance, in a Marketing project, you could create a label called “Email Marketing” and then assign this to the emails you want. Later on, you could find all pertaining items with a single click — literally! Multiple labels can be attached to emails (for instance, one label identifying the project name AND one label identifying the project sponsor) to help optimize your organizational skills. You can also create nested labels, a label (or even multiple labels) grouped underneath a label. While labels have to be applied BEFORE you go looking for these items, once you make this is a habit, you’ll find it’s a breeze to find what you need in your Gmail mailbox.

How to

1. On your computer, go to Gmail.
2. On the left, scroll down, then click More.
3. Click Create new label.
4. Name your label.
5. Click Create.

How your inbox will look with Label’s

Pre-defined Responses

If you are sending a similar response to a lot of people, this is for you.

Let it be follow-up, appreciation, Checking availability checking, etc.

There are two ways to achieve this.

• Canned response (inbuilt)
• Gmail Snippets by cloudHQ (Add on) — Recommended

Canned response

1. In Gmail, click the Gear icon, then click ‘Settings.’
2. Click the tab that says ‘Advanced.’
3. Click ‘Enable’ on the ‘Templates’ prompt.
4. Start a new email by hitting ‘Compose’ in the upper left-hand corner of your inbox.
5. Type the email message you’d like to save as a template.
6. Click the three dots icon on the bottom right-hand corner of the compose window, hover over ‘Templates,’ ‘Save draft as a template,’ and then click ‘Save as new template.’
7. Name your template.
8. Start a new email by hitting ‘Compose’ in the upper left-hand corner of your inbox.
9. Click the three dots icon on the bottom right-hand corner of the compose window, hover over ‘Templates,’ then click on the template name.
10. After the response is pasted, add your recipient and click ‘Send.’

Gmail Snippets by cloudHQ (Add on)

1. Install this add on Link
2. Click on the T+ icon on the top to add templates
3. By clicking “\” you can access the templates in the emails.

Note: You can even use a few replaceable variables as part of the template; these will automatically be fetched and added to the template. This will help to keep your response Personal.

Variables Available : *|FIRST_NAME|*, *|LAST_NAME|*, *|NAME|*, *|EMAIL|*, *|DAY_OF_WEEK|*

Email Tabs

This will help you in making Gmail labels or Gmail filters as tabs

1. Install this plugin — Link
2. Create any filters or right-click on a title to make it into a Tab.