Despite being the backbone of most of our work, email can be a real productivity killer. everyone competes for your attention at all hours of the day, and that little unread icon taunts you until you give up and reopen your inbox to see what’s going on. this, of course, interrupts the flow of your actual work.
I’m a slave to the notification icon as much as anyone. In an ideal world, I would learn to keep moving forward and manage email when I really have time between other tasks. but that is not as easy as it seems. So instead of changing my own behavior, I forced my inbox to do things my way so I could spend less time emailing and more time working. gmail has been a great ally in this, and the platform’s constant stream of new features has given me ever-increasing power to modify my inbox at will.
put off unimportant emails for later
despite advice from productivity experts, my inbox doubles as a to-do list. (hey, I’m not the only one). it just works for me: unread emails act as a constant reminder that something needs action, and since I check my email regularly, I never forget about those tasks. one unread email reminds me to respond to a customer when he has questions, and another reminds me to go get my car oil changed. I even send myself emails to remind me of certain pending tasks.
However, not all of these tasks require an immediate response, and having them unread in my inbox annoys me. plus, they make it harder to see urgent things that are mixed up. That’s why the gmail snooze button has become my new best friend: just hover over the message in question and click the little clock icon that appears. on the right. snooze banishes a message from your inbox until a time you specify, for example, tomorrow morning when you have free time to schedule an appointment with the mechanic, so you can keep things clean and anxiety-free.
schedule emails to send at the most convenient time
dealing with email as it arrives is rarely a productive use of your time. it’s better to group a few email sessions together, say, once every two hours, and delete everything at once. that way, you won’t be constantly interrupting your drive with an unrelated task.
The problem is that it’s hard to perfectly schedule those inbox sessions for every email. maybe it’s Friday afternoon, and I’d rather send a message on Tuesday morning when it’s not buried for the weekend. or maybe an email isn’t relevant until next week, but I want to jot it all down while it’s on my mind. gmail’s schedule button lets you write your email whenever you want and schedule it to send later, so it arrives exactly when you want it.
stop wasting time typing
It may seem silly to say that “writing emails is a waste of time,” but in the age of automation, it’s true. gmail has a number of features that can help you compose messages faster, so you can get back to doing the real work.
Templates have been around for a long time, although they used to be known as “canned responses”. these allow you to save certain blocks of text that you use frequently and insert them into any email with a few clicks. for example, you can use them to enter your address or submit a form response to a question you get asked every day.
You can create a template by opening a new message, typing the text you want to save, clicking the three dots to the right of the compose bar, selecting templates and , then save that draft as a template. then when composing an email reply, you can go to that same menu to insert text from any template. (Advanced users may prefer system-wide software like fraseexpress, which lets you write those templates even faster with a keyboard shortcut.)
Smart Compose is a new feature you’re probably already familiar with because it’s enabled by default: it predicts what it thinks you’re going to type and displays the rest of the sentence in gray text. you can press tab to complete the prediction and continue typing. If you disabled this feature when it first came out, I get it, it’s distracting, you should give it another try. once you get used to it, it’s amazing how quickly you can read some messages.
Finally, gmail recently started allowing multiple signatures, so you can switch between different signatures depending on who you’re emailing. it’s rolling out slowly, but you can click the gear and go to settings > signature to see if you have it. once you’ve created multiple signatures, simply click the pencil icon in a compose window to toggle between them.
mute distracting email threads
I have friends and family who like to start long email chains of multiple people sharing lame jokes, political debates, or other time-wasting nonsense. unfortunately, there is no way to leave a thread entirely without pestering someone to move it to bcc. but gmail offers the next best thing: the mute feature, which prevents the thread from appearing in your inbox when new messages arrive.
to mute a thread in gmail, right-click on it and choose mute; that is all. additional messages will still be marked as unread, but they will bypass the inbox altogether and go into the bowels of the all mail tab, never to be seen unless you search for them. (That way you can catch up on those threads later, if you like, and can even turn them on if they become relevant.)
pause your inbox to stop the barrage of notifications
When muting one thread isn’t enough, it’s time to mute your entire inbox.
You could just close the email tab, but chances are you really need to access some of your old messages for your work. in that case you need a gmail plugin called inbox pause. we mentioned pausing inbox in our list of the best gmail plugins (review that story when you’re done here), but it works like this: install the boomerang extension and you’ll see a big pause button on the gmail left sidebar. click it whenever you need to stop incoming messages. however, you can still let certain senders through if you’re expecting something urgent.
If you prefer not to install a third-party extension for this job, there are other workarounds that may help. you can use gmail offline, for example, just go to settings > offline and check the enable box, which will allow you to view your email even when you are completely disconnected from the web. (Of course, this only works if you don’t need the rest of the internet for your work.)
You can also use a third party email client such as thunderbird or apple mail. Even if you don’t want to use a desktop client all the time, you can add your gmail account, then open the client and put it in offline mode whenever you want some peace. that way you can continue to use the web while your email remains frozen in an offline state. just go to the settings > from gmail; forwarding > pop/imap to enable imap access; that’s what allows those desktop programs to access your email. you can then go ahead and sign in to your email app of choice.