Having an organized plan for your inbox and a firm grip on its features will maximize efficiency and ensure you move through your emails quickly. In this post, we’re focusing on Gmail secrets to streamline your daily routine. Keep reading to uncover these time-saving shortcuts and expert tips. 

 

Undo Send

Be sure to take advantage of “Undo Send.” It will change your life. From now on you can have up to 30 seconds to change your mind about sending that email to your ex. If you have shortcuts enabled, just press “z.”

 

Link Tasks to Email

Whenever you get an email that requires an action, select the “More” button from the menu in reading view. From the drop-down list, select “Add to Tasks.” A Google Task to-do list will pop up at the bottom of your screen. Edit the to-do list, and set deadlines to your heart’s content.

 

Use Canned Responses

This is another Labs feature you need to enable. It lets you save and use templated emails; also it saves you from retyping the same thing over and over (or copying/pasting from somewhere else). Another excellent solution for this is TextExpander.

 

Use Shortcuts

Enabling keyboard shortcuts in Gmail is another great way to save yourself a ton of time. To enable keyboard shortcuts, go to Settings > Advanced > Custom keyboard shortcuts > Enable. You can also open up the Keyboard Shortcuts tab in Settings after you’ve enabled them to configure your own keyboard shortcuts.

 

Use Smart Compose

Use Smart Compose, Gmail’s predictive text feature that can add phrases for you and literally finish your sentences. As you’re typing, you’ll see the predictive text in grey, and then you can hit the Tab button to complete the phrase. 

 

Turn Off Conversations View

A lot of people can’t get comfortable with the Conversations View on Gmail (where threads are grouped together), but few people know that it’s really easy to turn it off (under Settings > General).

 

Always Scroll to the Bottom of the Thread

The main problem with the Conversations View (if you do decide to keep it), is when there are 2 unread emails in the same thread, it’s really easy to not notice the message below the fold. The solution is to always scroll to the bottom of a thread. 

 

Control Your Apps

If you use Google OAuth to log in to other sites, use plugins on top of Gmail, or any other Google products (Calendar, Contacts, YouTube, etc), then you’ve given these sites access to your Google account. You should be very careful with this—not everyone is reliable or trustworthy. The good news is you can always view all sites connected to your Gmail/Google, and you can revoke access to the ones you no longer use or trust. To do this, follow these instructions.

 

Implement Search Hacks

Gmail was the first email service to introduce tons of free storage (2 GB at the time it launched, and now it offers 25 GB and people still complain). The key selling point for Gmail is that you never have to delete or even organize your emails—just archive everything and use the search function to find what you need. Unfortunately, most people just search for keywords and ignore the rich advanced Gmail search features. Click here to see the full list of useful search operators.

 

Quote Selected Text

Simply just compose an email and click on the “Text Formatting” icon to add formatting. 

 

Enable Google Maps Preview

Enable Google Maps Preview in your Gmail Labs section to automatically preview addresses mentioned in emails you receive. No more copying and pasting – just use your eyes.

 

Mute Conversations

If a thread gets too annoying, just mute the conversation. It will disappear from your inbox and reappear into the ‘All Mail’ archive, instead of landing in your inbox.

 

Use SaneBox

You don’t have to stick to just the features Gmail offers to increase productivity either, you can install some extensions too. SaneBox organizes your email through AI algorithms that are personalized to your email habits to decrease inbox clutter. 

 

Have a favorite email app or hack? Tweet us @SaneBox and let us know.