Make Gmail Your Productivity Center – Part 1

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When people talk about Google Mail (You may still call it GMail, like I do) they tend to describe it as just another webmail site, albeit a good one. While this is true, there are many tools available which can make GMail into a powerful productivity system, capable of organizing your work or life. While I don’t know everything about every tool available, I’m going to show you some things which I do that tend to make things easier for me. Stick around and take a look. Part 1 is below.

First let’s talk about what you can do by default, without ever adding additional functionality. Aside from sending and receiving mail, you can organize it in some pretty interesting ways. One great way to do this is to use labels and filters. If you head to your settings, you can see what I mean.

Labels are simply that – labels. I can label a message anything I want which makes sense to me. Some people like to label messages by the sender, some people like to do it by content, etc. It’s pretty easy to create a new label. Just head to Settings and go to the Label tab. From there, all you have to do is type in a name which makes sense to you and click the Create button.

One thing I’ve found very necessary is to label messages which are very repetitive. For example, as a Twitter user I get a lot of messages notifying me when someone follows me, when I get messages, etc. This is quite common these days for lots of services, whether it be Flickr, Facebook, Twitter, Identi.ca – well, you get the idea. While this is great and it allows me to see what is going on to some extent on my various social networking accounts without having to log in to the applicable website, it also clutters up my inbox. This is where the coupling of labels and filters comes in. I tend to make individual labels for each service which emails me, so if I get a message from Twitter it will come in and be dropped into the Twitter label. If I get a Facebook message, it is dropped into the Facebook label. It goes on like this for each service I use, each email group to which I’m subscribed, etc. The way you can do this easily is to apply a filter to incoming message which sticks the appropriate label onto the message and archives it so that it doesn’t clutter your inbox. See below for some screen shots which illustrate how you can implement this yourself.

Filter Settings 1
Filter Settings 2

You may have noted above in the second settings screen shot that there are some other interesting ways you can interact with your email using filters. It isn’t hard to think of ways that you could use this functionality. For example, you could use filters to eliminate common junk mail or spam by deleting it or by filtering it for review. You could also forward messages of a certain type to another email address. You can also use something called a canned response, if you enable it in your labs tab. This can be an extremely useful tool, especially if you find yourself often creating the same sort of email over and over again or if you’d like to send a standard response to a common question you receive via email. All you’ve got to do is enable the option, write the email content, and then select the option to save it as a canned response. After that, you can call upon it in new emails or send it as a standard response with filters. I’ll stick some screen shots below for your benefit. Other than those, that’s it for Part 1 of this article. Head over to Part 2 now.

Canned Response Option
Canned Response Save
Canned Response Insert

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