For many of us, opening our Gmail inbox is a daily ritual, and Google’s email client includes labels, filters, stars, and other features intended to help you manage your messages as quickly as possible. but those are just surface level, you can go deeper.
Experimenting with gmail’s layout is another way to increase your email productivity. can show the most important messages first, help you avoid inbox clutter, and give you a different perspective on your mountain of emails.
Click the three dots in the upper right corner of your inbox to choose how many unread emails appear on the screen at once (up to 50). From the same menu, you can also choose to hide the section when all your emails are read.
You can also use a simple “is:unread” search in gmail to see everything you haven’t opened yet in your inbox and archive, in reverse chronological order. this will hide all your other emails from view and will not change the layout of your main inbox.
2. show important emails first
You can also have Gmail show you the most important emails in your inbox first, as judged by Google’s artificial intelligence algorithms—those algorithms are based on indicators such as who you email most frequently and the keywords in your messages. Emails that Gmail thinks are important have a small yellow arrow next to their subject headers.
click the gear icon (top right) on the main interface of gmail, then choose important first under tray type input. emails considered important appear in the top section, in reverse chronological order, and everything else appears in the bottom section. click the three dots (top right) to choose how many important emails appear on the screen at once and whether or not the section should be hidden when empty.
regardless of your inbox layout, you can run an “is:important” search to see all the important emails in your gmail account, in reverse chronological order, without changing your inbox layout. You can also click the arrow markers to the left of email subject headings to mark messages as important or not important.
3. show featured emails first
You may not have realized how comprehensive the gmail star system is: click the gear icon (top right), then view all settings and general, and under stars you’ll see that there are 12 different types of stars to choose from (you don’t have to use all of them).
click save changes, then the gear icon again, then highlighted first under type Inbox, and all messages you’ve starred next to will go right to the top of your inbox. they will appear in reverse chronological order and with each type of star grouped together. click the three dots (top right) to set how many starred messages appear on the screen at once.
[related: 4 tips to reduce your gmail inbox to zero]
You can also search for starred emails, which will not change the layout of your gmail inbox. run a query for “is:starring” to see everything that has a star next to it, or use a search like “has:orange-star” to find specific types of stars (hover over the stars on the page general tab on the gmail settings screen to see what your individual labels are).
4. switch to priority inbox
click the gear icon on the main interface of gmail (top right), then select priority inbox under type of inbox to switch to it. click customize just below, and you can choose how many sections are displayed on the screen, as well as what is placed in them.
One of the most useful sections is important and unread, which moves all important emails and all emails you haven’t opened yet to the top of your conversations list (click Click the three dots at the top right to choose how many emails are displayed in each section). any tag you have set in gmail can be used to populate one of your sections.
5. modify default settings
You can also make adjustments to Gmail’s default layout, which uses tabs at the top of your inbox to divide your emails into categories. if you’ve never explored these options before, it’s worth experimenting with them to see which setting best suits your needs.
click the gear icon (top right) on the main gmail interface, look for the heading inbox type, look next to default and choose custom. you can choose which tabs appear on the screen: main, social, promotions, updates and forums—and gmail will try to sort your messages into these tabs as they arrive.
[related: dig up any old email in your inbox, even if it’s in the trash]
In our experience, this classification works quite well, but sometimes gmail can get a category wrong. you can always drag emails between tabs to tell gmail where a certain type of email should go, which should improve your future sorting decisions.