How To: Gmail Inbox Zero

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Working from home means something that could have been a chat probably turned into an e-mail. With that increase in mind, we’ve made a quick 5-step guide to help you get the most out of your Gmail, reduce those cursed unread e-mails and reach the promised land of Inbox Zero regularly.

1. Sort It Out

There are 5 (yes, five) ways of sorting your inbox. Default is what we’re used to, where e-mails are sorted by date. Important first will require Gmail to predict which e-mails you’d find important and place them at the top, and your less important ones will be filed in a lower inbox at the bottom. Unread first will put unopened mail up top, whereas starred first will put your favourites at the top. Priority Inbox combines all of these and puts e-mails you’re likely to interact with at the top, based on your previous actions.

2. Customise

Once you’ve got your priorities set, you can sort out the labels. Select a bunch of messages with a common theme, click the shopping tag icon and choose either predefined Gmail labels or create your own. The option of “nest labels” is like creating subfolders, so you can have one large main folder with respective sub-sections. You can also colour-code your labels and finding what you need becomes quicker easier, and looks a whole lot cleaner.

3. Unsubscribe

How many times have you said “U ija, I’ll read that later” and you’ve got yet another newsletter loitering in your inbox? Days pass. Weeks. Months. The newsletters pile up in their thousands. You won’t admit it, but it weighs on your conscience. Just unsubscribe. The easiest way to reach the promised land of Inbox Zero is to limit the amount of mail you receive. Avoid the newsletters you don’t read anyway, and save yourself the trouble of deleting the ones yet to arrive.

4. Archive vs Delete

Know the difference. Archiving means e-mails you’re not sure you want to delete are filed in another folder and can still be found when needed. Deleting means they can sit in your trash can before permanent deletion in 30 days. Archiving works for digital receipts, for example – you won’t need it now, but later, who knows?

5. Self-Help

You should be having enough conversations with yourself throughout the day in any case: having digital ones is unnecessary. There are notes and to-do lists that Gmail offers, so make use of those, especially Todoist. It makes tracking and completing tasks more manageable, so you can talk to yourself the old-fashioned way, inside your head.

Those are our tips on reaching Inbox Zero – has it helped? There are a lot more tools and apps to help you get there, but these are more than enough to help you on your journey!

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