Make Gmail Your Productivity Center – Part 3

This is Part 3 of my multi-part post detailing various features you can use to improve your productivity by using Gmail. If you haven’t read the previous parts, you may want to start at the beginning.

So in the previous parts of this series, I’ve talked about using filters and labels (I noticed today that Google has made labels a more prominent feature in Gmail, which should really help highlight how important they are) to organize mail, using canned responses to automate repetitive emails, using GMail as a central hub for all of your various email accounts, a little bit about keyboard shortcuts and I briefly mentioned a few preview options in Labs which can help save some time when viewing emails.

There are some more quick and easy tools which are easily enabled within Gmail which can really make a difference when it comes to usability and productivity. A couple of these features can be found under the General tab in your settings. The signature and the personal level indicator settings may not seem like a big deal to you, and they really aren’t. They’re sort of necessary features, which is why you should enable them. Who wants to have to retype their signature or paste one on from an external file? Also, isn’t it nice to know at a glance whether or not you’re the main recipient of a message? Easy.

Some more settings which I find absolutely necessary can be found in the Labs section.

Tasks – This is a tool which works great, integrates well with the interface, and gets out of your way when you don’t need it. You can create tasks from existing emails, which is an awesome feature. You may want to upgrade to a more robust task system later, but this is a great place to start.
Message translation – If you get a a lot of emails in languages you don’t speak (I don’t) you’ll probably find it useful. I have it enabled just in case I happen to need it.
Quick links – This is a pretty great tool. I actually use it to save searches which I use a lot so I don’t have to remember exactly how I found something.
Signature tweaks – this is just a preference thing. I prefer to have my signature before quoted text and without the double dash.
Sender Time Zone – I live in the UK, but most of my contacts and work is in the US. This means that I’m often awake while other people are asleep and that I may be sending emails at times which aren’t great for other people. This option helps me keep that in mind and reply accordingly.
Quote selected text – It’s just nice to be able to highlight a chunk of text and have it clearly displayed in your response rather than having to direct someone to the appropriate part of an email. It just makes things simpler.
Navbar drag and drop – not much to say on this one. If you have the option to be able to drag things around or not, why not choose to be able to do it?
Forgotten attachment detector – Oh, I think everyone has done this a time or 2. I’ve so careful about this these days that I rarely need this option, but of course I’ve got it enabled anyway. There is nothing more embarrassing than mentioning an attachment and not including it.
Mark as Read – Before I had this button, Gmail was sort of the bane of my existence. One button and my problems are solved. I don’t always want to open an email. Sometimes you already know what’s in there, right? Well you can select a veritable cornucopia of emails and with one click of this button they’re all marked as read. Simple? I would say so. I have no idea why this is an additional option instead of a built-in part of Gmail.
Go to Label – This option enables a really nice way of navigating through your labels. Once you start using labels you’ll realize how great this is.
Create a Document – If you use Google Docs you’ll want this. I use Google Docs all of the time, and I’d argue that you should be using at least some form of cloud based office suite as well. It’s really too good to not use. Anyway, this option enabled you to do awesome things like creating a Google Document from an email conversation. Pretty cool.
Suggest more recipients – Enough said. I use this all of the time.
Search Autocomplete – Why not make search better and easier?
Inserting Images – This lets you put images in the message body of your emails, if you want to do that.
Google Calendar gadget – This is a gadget which allows you to view and manipulate calendar entries from the left sidebar within Gmail.
Google Docs gadget – Like I said before, I use Google Docs a lot. This lets you see your docs, create new ones, open them, etc. It sits on your left sidebar
Add any gadget – this is great for adding third party support. There are tons of gadgets you could add. One example is the gadget for Remember The Milk, the popular task/to do manager.

After you’ve got all of this stuff enabled, you’ll probably find that things are a whole lot more usable, but you may not know exactly how to go about using this new system you’ve created. Don’t worry. We’ll get there soon enough. Head back this way for Part 4 or stay tuned by by subscribing now.

Make Gmail Your Productivity Center – Part 1

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