The average employee receives about 85 emails a day. however, most of us don’t put a lot of time or forethought into what we actually do with those emails.
Email takes up such a large percentage of our time that any inefficiencies here quickly escalate and can easily waste hours of your professional time. Fortunately, Gmail has a ton of flexible, intuitive, and easily accessible features to improve your Gmail organization, and therefore your email productivity.
In this article, we’ll cover specific ways on how to organize gmail to maximize your productivity.
organizing gmail for productivity
Before I dive into specific tips, I want to summarize the top three goals you should have throughout this process. Each of the 17 tips I’m going to detail will try to achieve one or more of these general priorities:
- prioritization. Prioritization is about learning how important your emails are at a glance, from the moment they first arrive to the moment you act on them. consequence. mastering this will help you avoid being distracted by low-priority messages, while also ensuring your high-priority messages are addressed immediately. you’ll also be able to quickly tell which of the messages in your inbox should be dealt with first.
- categorization. categorization can help with prioritization, but it also helps you keeps emails from cluttering your main inbox and makes it easier for you to find your messages. With good categorization practice, you should never have a problem finding an email, as long as you know its general purpose or function.
- usability. Finally, you need a system that maximizes the usability. if your rules are complicated or confusing to follow, it will be almost impossible to follow them. if you can’t remember which categories you’ve created, they’re pretty much useless. it also helps design strategies that can be employed quickly and efficiently, to minimize the time they take to execute.
general principles for gmail inbox organization
If you want to be successful in mastering your gmail organization and productivity, you’ll need these general principles to guide you. there’s no switch you can flip to suddenly be more organized; instead, you should execute new tactics and habits with these directives:
- clear rules. first, you must have a clear and specific system on how to handle, categorize and treat emails. there is no “correct” system; in fact, you and your co-workers may have radically different views on the best way to organize an inbox. what matters is that your rules are formalized and don’t change, so they can be followed consistently.
- cleanliness. chances are you’ve been using this account for years. And while you could simply commit to employing better organizational habits in the future, that doesn’t do the thousands of currently unclassified emails in your inbox much good. at some point, you’ll have to clean up that inbox, according to your new rules. for help, check out our guide on how to clean gmail.
- immediate action. It’s not effective to put off organizing your inbox and then try to go through everything at once. don’t think of inbox organization as regular spring cleaning; you should apply your rules immediately, to each new email that arrives. a few seconds here and there will keep you much more organized (and less stressed) than hours of work every few months.
- continuous consistency. Do you remember the rules you formalized? you’ll need to keep them constant, indefinitely, if you want them to work. any deviation from your stated goals and directives will cause chaos in your new organizational system.
- minimum effort. Finally, you’ll want to come up with strategies and policies that require as little time and effort as possible. Even if your system is effective in theory, if it takes too long to manage on an ongoing basis, it could end up hurting your productivity instead of improving it.
how to organize gmail in 17 tips
Now it’s time to get into the meat of this article. What follows are the 17 best ways to organize gmail that you can use in different combinations to improve the efficiency of your organization:
1. switch to new gmail (if you haven’t already).
In 2018, google offered the opportunity to switch to the “new” version of gmail. If you haven’t already, I encourage you to do so. The design and user interfaces are much sleeker and easier to navigate, which will make your gmail experience smoother, but more importantly, there are a ton of new features you can use to streamline your gmail organization. .
switching is simple: just click the gear icon in the top right corner of the desktop app and select “try the new gmail”. if you see the option to “go back to classic gmail”, then congratulations, you’ve made the switch.
Many of the suggestions in this article will refer to features unique to the new gmail or locations of features that only apply to the new gmail design. keep that in mind before continuing.
2. use the default display density.
In the new gmail, you’ll have several “display density” options, which change the way your emails are presented in the app. you can access them by clicking the gear icon.
Some users will naturally prefer the “comfortable” or “compact” views, but for organizational reasons, I strongly recommend the default. The main advantage of an alternate view is to fit more emails on a single page or view, but you won’t miss as many if you keep it the default.
The main advantage of the default view is that it allows you to conveniently preview the attachments associated with each email. Not only will you be able to see a color-coded indication of what types of files are attached to a conversation, but you’ll also get the first few characters of the file’s title.
great when trying to quickly find a specific attachment, like a purchase order or ledger.
3. create new tags.
here, we start giving you tips on how to organize your emails, specifically. If you’re used to using Outlook or any Microsoft product, you’re probably used to a system of folders and subfolders. but in gmail, things work a bit differently.
gmail is based on a system called “labels”, which allows you to associate emails with different topics, categories, clients or projects. The sky is the limit here, so start creating new labels that you can apply to your emails. In the settings menu, go to the labels tab and scroll to the bottom. there, you can create a new tag.
title whatever you like, but keep it concise and informative, so you can tell at a glance what it should be used for.
Once you’ve created it, you can see it in the left sidebar. when you click on a tag, your inbox will automatically display any emails that are tagged with that tag. in the left menu, you can even click the vertical ellipses next to it to assign a custom color to that label. you can also add new tags at the bottom of this left menu.
then when you receive a new email, you can click the bookmark icon at the top of the screen to open the labels submenu and assign as many labels as you like to the email.
There are many valid ways to use tags. I personally use mine to differentiate between different types of projects, such as development, content management, and marketing. but I’ve also seen people use them for different clients, different types of information (like emails with important attachments), or different levels of priority/urgency.
I recommend using a different method for priority/urgency (which I’ll cover in later tips), but it’s available as an option.
4. split tags into subtags.
You may have noticed that the tag creation box allows you to “nest” new tags below old tags. this is analogous to the subfolders you might find in a microsoft product. I encourage you to use this as a way to keep all of your labels organized, especially if you have a lot of roles in your organization.
for example, you can have a tag for “customer communications”, with separate tags for each customer, such as “customer a”, “customer b”, etc. You wouldn’t necessarily need to label an email as “customer communications” and “customer to”, but you could if you wanted.
5. use multiple tags per email (if necessary).
As you probably know from experience, a single email can contain a large amount of information, sometimes spilling out into several different categories. consequently, it doesn’t make sense to maintain a strict one-to-one relationship between your emails and your labels. instead, be sure to tag all your emails with as many tags as appropriate.
For example, let’s say a client sends you an email referring to a website you’re building for them. They mention that their account manager is doing an excellent job. they also convey login instructions for a new project management platform they would like you to join.
You may need to reference this email for a variety of purposes, so please label it “client to”, “human resources information”, “web project management” (and potentially a specific project within that broad label) and “login”. instructions.”
6. add more tabs (categories) and organize them.
You may have noticed that by default, Gmail offers three tabs at the top of your inbox: main, social, and promotions. gmail algorithms are quite complex; they can easily recognize which emails belong to each of these categories and classify them appropriately. this keeps your main inbox free of clutter, like notifications from facebook and twitter, or marketing newsletters from your favorite brands.
You may not realize that you have some control over these tabs, including access to tabs you didn’t know existed. There are a few ways to access this setting, but the easiest is to click the gear icon and click “configure inbox”.
From there, you’ll be able to choose from several tabs to include in this header bar, including main (the default for most emails), social (for notifications from social media platforms), promotions (for newsletters and offers), updates (for project management and related platform notifications), and forums (for forum notifications).
You can rearrange them however you like, but I recommend that you include them all, or at least as many as are relevant to you. this will help you keep your main inbox uncluttered, as much as possible, and will do most of the sorting work for you.
You will also have the option to include any starred messages in your main inbox, which I highly recommend you do as well.
7. use bookmarks.
gmail provides its users with “flags”, sometimes called importance flags, to indicate the importance of a given email. this exists as a chevron to the left of your email in the default desktop view. star is another type of marker, but we’ll get into stars in a bit.
You can click the chevron to turn the importance marker on or off (indicated by a golden yellow color). this is a useful binary function that you can use to indicate the importance of an email. that “importance” is up to you. because you can already toggle emails as “read” or “unread”, indicating whether or not you’ve seen or read the email, my recommended use is to designate emails you haven’t yet taken action on with a bookmark.
That way, when you’re browsing through your emails, you can quickly determine which emails are there for informational purposes only and which ones still require an action from you (such as a reply or completion of a task). the only potential issue here is when you uncheck an email thread and then receive a new email in that thread which gives you a new action item.
the marker will be off by default, so you’ll need to re-mark it if you want it to sort accurately. this is also advantageous because in the left bar, you can click on the “important” category and automatically filter your inbox to show you only flagged messages.
8. enable auto dial.
Do you know how gmail can automatically detect if a new email automatically belongs to those categories in the inbox header bar? well, the app can also learn to sort emails based on your own habits, and it’s a setting you’ll want to take advantage of.
In the Inbox tab of the settings menu, you’ll have the option for gmail to “use my past actions to predict which messages are important to me.” select it and save the changes; when you do, gmail will gradually learn what types of emails should be marked as important (according to your standards) and start marking them as appropriate, as they arrive.
You can use criteria such as the sender, the keywords involved, or the subject line to make decisions.
9. take advantage of read, unread and postponed messages.
I decided to include read, unread, and deferred messages on one line because they’re all pretty straightforward. We’ll start with read and unread messages, another binary indicator you can use to get information about an email at a glance. As you probably already know, all new emails will be “unread” by default, which is indicated by a bold font.
You can mark an email as unread by opening it or selecting “mark as read” using the ellipses at the top of the desktop app.
once read, you can mark a message as unread if you want to save it for later. I recommend using this feature to organize the emails you’ve read and internalized, and differentiate them from the ones you haven’t read yet.
For example, if you open an email and see that it has several paragraphs of text that you don’t have time for, you can close it and mark it as unread so you can read it later.
Alternatively, if you want to delay reading or acting on an email until later, you can take advantage of the snooze feature (a feature in the new gmail). There are several ways to do this, but the easiest is to click the clock icon at the top of any email when you have it open.
You can then choose to remove the email from your inbox temporarily and resend it to yourself at a specific date and time. this is useful if an email is not immediately relevant to you, but will be in a few days; that way you can treat it as a new email when appropriate.
If you find that you need the information in the meantime, you can click the Postponed category in the left menu and open a list of each and every email you’ve postponed that is currently awaiting a new receipt.
Mastering the read, unread, and deferred email designations will give you full control over how you view the emails in your inbox at a glance. And don’t miss our post on how to find unread emails in gmail and outlook!
10. add more stars.
While we’re on the subject of using visuals to quickly organize and assess the nature of your emails, let’s talk about stars. As I mentioned earlier, stars are another type of marker, alongside the chevron-shaped “importance markers” that Google uses to indicate importance levels by default.
Before we dive into the details of how to use the star system, I encourage you to enable more star types. by default you can only use this as a binary; like importance chevrons, they can only be turned on and off. but if you go to the settings menu, under the general tab, you can enable multiple different colored stars (and other symbols, used in the same way as your stars).
If you’re new to the system, you can opt for the gmail-recommended 4-star system, but if you’re feeling adventurous, you can turn them all on at once.
11. invent a star system.
Now that you have up to 12 stars to work with, you’ll need some kind of star system. if you have been following my advice, it has a tab system to filter various categories of emails at once, a read/unread/snooze system to indicate if you have viewed the content of an email, a tag system to save your emails emails organized by subject and a bookmark system to indicate if you still need to take action on an email.
so what’s left? what could you use these stars for? that’s totally up to you, and if you’re a minimalist or someone who doesn’t get a lot of emails, you may not need stars. but I personally like to use stars as an indication of urgency or importance.
For example, you might use a green star for an invitation to lunch from an old colleague (it’s not the end of the world if you miss it), but a yellow star for an important customer question, an orange star for a employee waiting for information to get moving and a red star for a true emergency.
You can also use these symbols as a way to indicate what type of action is warranted; If you have an inbox full of chevroned emails, these can help you act in batches. for example, you can use a blue “i” symbol to indicate an email thread that is waiting for more information, or a “?” purple. to indicate a question that should be answered by you.
you can also use the yellow “!” to indicate a quick task that can be done, or the red “!” to indicate a long task to perform.
It’s not the exact system you use that’s important, but the fact that it’s designed for your needs and used consistently for all your emails.
12. change the conversation view.
this advice refers to a feature with two main options, and there is no clear answer as to which answer is “correct”. In outlook, new email messages arrive as separate line items, one at a time, even if they are part of a conversation thread; In other words, as you exchange new messages in an email conversation, they will arrive separately.
by contrast, google’s default view is to display an entire email conversation as a line item. when you open an item, you’ll see all the emails within that conversation, which you can choose to expand or collapse as you see fit. There are advantages to either view, but most people have a strong preference for the other.
For the average email sender, this design change can make a significant difference in how you perceive your messages at a glance. and luckily gmail allows you to switch between them. In the general tab of the settings menu, you can turn “conversation view” on or off, depending on your preferences.
13. enable hover actions.
Organizing your emails is so much easier when you can click a single button, rather than navigate to a submenu and select the sorting option you want from there. that’s why stars and brands are so easily accessible. but you may not realize that you can enable “scroll actions”, which make features like archive, delete, mark read/unread, and snooze available with a single click as well.
You can enable this feature by going to the general tab in settings and then clicking “enable scroll actions”. once activated, you can hover over any email in your inbox and click the icon corresponding to the action you want to take.
14. activates the preview panel.
Here’s another semi-hidden feature you can enable to make it easier to organize your gmail inbox: turn on the preview pane. this is an “advanced” gmail setting that used to be called the gmail labs feature. Head to the advanced tab of the settings menu, and you can enable the ability to preview your messages next to the message list.
in practice, it resembles the layout of outlook. On the left, you’ll have a condensed list of emails, with subject lines and a short snippet of the message, and on the right, you’ll have the full message to peruse. you can also set a preview pane for the conventional gmail layout or opt for a vertical split.
None of these features will help you organize your emails directly, but they will give you more transparency into the content of each email at a glance. experiment with each option to see which works best for you.
15. set automatic filters.
I’m a big fan of automation. Why should you bother manually taking action on all your emails when you can set up rules to have those emails automatically filtered and organized on your behalf? Since this can save you a lot of time, I consider it one of the most important tips on this list.
In settings, go to the filters and blocked addresses tab. from there, select create a new filter. once you start the process, you will need to complete it in two steps. The first is to set the criteria for your filter, using qualities available in gmail search. for example, you can filter all emails that come from a certain email address, or those that include certain words or phrases, or those that have an attachment of a certain size.
Note that you can create as many gmail filters as you like, so it’s a good idea to be as specific as possible.
Once you’ve identified a type of email that you want to automatically filter in the future, you’ll need to decide what you want to do with them. You have several options here, including automatically starring it, removing it, marking it as important, or assigning it to a specific category.
Two things to note here. First, be careful with the settings of these filters; There is a chance that you will face unintended consequences like deleting an important email by mistake based on the rules you created. After creating a new filter, check multiple folders for unauthorized or miscategorized emails to make sure it works as intended, without spillovers.
Second, if you want to build even more automation into your email organization, you can turn to third-party apps, extensions, and plugins.
16. consider implementing multiple inboxes.
multiple inboxes is another advanced setting, but the title is a bit misleading. you will not make things more complex; instead, it will make them simpler and faster.
gmail has a robust search feature that can help you create a view of just the emails you want to see; for example, you can view only starred emails with a certain phrase in the subject line, or only starred emails from a specific sender. but if you run these search queries often enough, it can become annoying and time consuming.
multiple inboxes allow you to send these search criteria to permanent inbox-style slots in the left navigation bar. you can customize them however you like and access them anytime, just like you would your default inbox, sent emails, or spam folder.
17. work to get to inbox zero 5 emails at a time.
One of the general gmail organization principles I mentioned earlier hasn’t been addressed in most of these tips: the cleanup process. All of these tips will help you set up and enforce rules for organizing your gmail inbox in the future, but they won’t help you organize what you already have.
Unfortunately, I don’t have a hack that can help you easily apply rules to all the emails in your gmail inbox currently (which is surprising, considering how many gmail hacks and hacks there are). instead, I can only offer two possibilities. one, treat any email in your inbox before your commitment to the organization as a different era; leave them like that, and I hope you can find them in a specific search if you need them in the future.
second, work to get to inbox zero (here, referring to an inbox full of emails that are properly marked or categorized, depending on your system) just five emails at a time. Flagging five emails doesn’t take much time, so you can easily do it in the space you have between tasks and multiple times throughout the day. It also won’t be as overwhelming as trying to get your entire inbox in order in the course of a day.
With these tips, you should be able to master the art of organizing emails in gmail. You might not get to inbox zero overnight, but as long as you’re consistent, any effort you put into getting better organized will be worth it. Be sure to check out our great gmail tips post for more things you can try to improve the way you send emails, as well as our gmail stats post to see how other people around the world are using gmail.
If you’re interested in further improving your productivity in gmail, I highly recommend giving emailanalytics a try. Our tool integrates with your Gmail account to show you stats on how you’re emailing, including how long it takes you to write and read messages, and how your email threads are developing. after a few rounds of analysis, you’ll discover some key areas where you need to improve. sign up for free today!