Make Gmail Your Productivity Center – Part 4

This is the final part 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 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 told you to enable a whole lot of options in the Labs section which will enhance the Gmail experience.

Since I left you with a lot of functionality but not a whole lot about how to use that functionality, that’s what I’m going to cover next. Let me preface this with something, though. I’m one of those guys who likes to use the keyboard as much as possible. I’m pretty handy with the mouse but if I’m doing to use a system a lot over a long period of time I like to learn how to use it efficiently with the keyboard. One reason I do this is because it makes me feel cool, like I’m sort of awesome hacker or something. You may not have that fantasy, but I do. Anyway, the other reason is that I find it really helps minimize neck and back pain due to reaching and moving too much with the mouse. That being said, maybe you don’t want to use the keyboard. I personally find it faster, but if that’s not a priority for you or you find you manage ok with the mouse, all of your tools are there at your disposal. I don’t really need to tell you how to use them. If you want to know more about the keyboard thing, though, this section is for you.

Gmail was designed with the keyboard user in mind, and you can do almost everything that way. There are a lot of shortcuts available and you’ll have a special tab which lists them if you enabled the custom keyboard shortcuts in Labs. if you didn’t, you can still find them here. So yeah, you can just look there or I’ve stuck them down below in a more ordered format.

Help:
? to bring up shortcut help window, which provides a command list. This is the most important thing you can learn.

Search:
/ to move focus to the search box

Email:
c to compose a new email
o to open a conversation
u to go back to thread list
k for newer conversation
j for older conversation
x to select a conversation
s to star a conversation
m to ignore a conversation
! to report as spam
# to send to trash
p for previous message
n for next message
r for reply
a for reply to all
f to forward
g + i to go to the inbox
g + s to go to starred conversations
g + t to go to sent messages
g + d to go to drafts
g + a to go to all mail
g + c to go to contacts
* + a to select all conversations
* + n to deselect all conversations
* + r to select read conversations
* + u to select unread conversations
* + s to select starred conversations
* + t to select unstarred conversations
Shift + n to update conversation
z to undo last action
. to open more actions menu
Shift + i to mark as read
Shift + u to mark as unread
e to archive
v to open move to menu

Labels:
g + l to bring up label navigation window
l to open labels as menu
y to remove a label
] to remove label and go to previous conversation
[ to remove label and go to next conversation

Tasks:
Shift + t while viewing an email/conversation to add the conversation as a task
g + k to bring up the Tasks window

Google Docs:
g + w to create a blank Google document – I can’t seem to find a way to open a document from the contents of an email without clicking the button on the right

So yeah, there you are. Those are your keyboard shortcuts. What I did to learn this stuff is just made frequent use of the help overlay bye typing ‘?’ and forced myself to do everything with the keyboard until I had it down. Yes, it takes up some time. All of this stuff does, but once you’ve got it all set up in the way you want it, your system is running smoothly and your skills are sharp, it will really enable you to get a lot more done in much less time. Remember to make frequent use of labels, because these really help you find things. I like to keep my inbox as empty as possible by archiving the vast majority of my mail but applying stars and labels in order to find things when I need them again. It really does work better than having to wade through a massive inbox. It’s a great feeling to be able to open up a clean and ordered workspace rather than one that’s cluttered and disorganized and doesn’t really work for your needs.

This is the last post in this series, so please let me know if you’ve found it helpful. This probably isn’t my last time writing about Gmail, as I use it do often. I’m also planning some posts around Google Docs, some of Google’s other tools, and various browsers and extensions which help me get things done quickly. Stick around mindreap if you’d like to see what’s coming. Why not just subscribe 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