5 Ways to Take Back Control of Your Gmail Inbox

Is your Gmail inbox out of control? Well, don’t worry, in today’s video, I’m going to show you five simple and easy ways to take back control of all of your email. Hello everyone, Scott Friesen here at SimpliVity, helping you to get more done and enjoy less stress. And let’s dive into tip number one. This is a mess.

I can see a whole bunch of emails here.

Some are read, some are unread, where do I begin? Well, my first tip for you has to do with changing the way that you view your email. By default, this is what Gmail well displays to us. All of our email here within the inbox.

But if we come up to our gear settings, we have a number of different types of inboxes and different views that we can choose from. So, for example, maybe I just want to see my unread messages first. If I click this option, what it’s going to do, it’s going to bring all of my unread messages to the top and if I scroll down, I’ve got everything else. These are all of the messages that I’ve opened at least once before. Now, it makes it more convenient, I can always collapse my unread and just go to my read or vice versa, I can collapse and then maximize these areas as well.

But this is just one of the many different ways in which we can view our inbox. Another one here is called priority inbox. And in this case, what it’s going to do, it’s going to list my important and unread email at the very top.

Next comes the start area. And now I’ve got everything else below that.

Now you can customize these views as well. So, you don’t have to just choose the default, but you can view these in a variety of different ways. I’m just going to go back to the default view here for a second and show a few other views that you may not be fully aware of. Down below are our inbox type, we have our reading pains. Now by default, Gmail is showing us a no split view, meaning that I have to actually click on every single one of these emails in order to get into them and actually read them.

But if you’re used to something more like Outlook, for example, you can get those views here as well. So here we have the right of inbox, so I can click on the messages on the left-hand side, but I can read them here on the right-hand side. And of course, I can reply and forward just like I would normally do. This might be a more convenient view and yes, you can change it to your liking here so you can deal with email the way that you want. There’s a third option here called below the inbox.

So here your messages will be listed in the top. And then down below, you will have the body of the message here. So, you can read and reply just as you would normally. So, make sure that you get comfortable with the different views, test them out for yourself so that you can find something that works for you. Tip number two has to do with snoozing email for later, this be one of the most effective ways of managing your email.

Let’s say that you’ve got a message such as this one that has come into your account and you say, I need to reply to this, I want to reply to this, but I just don’t wanna deal with it right now. Well, if you leave it here in your inbox, it risks getting lost and maybe you just won’t come back to it at all. However, in the very far right-hand corner of each message when you hover over that message, you can see that there’s a little clock icon. This is the snooze icon. By selecting this option, I can choose a time, one of the default times listed here, or I can pick a specific time when I would like this message to come back to my inbox.

So, no, it’s not gone for good, it’s simply just going to leave my inbox for a little while.

So for example, maybe I wanna choose later today, I wanna reply to this this evening. I’m gonna select later today, it is now gone. It is no longer in my inbox, but will automatically be returned to my inbox at 8:30 pm this evening. Let’s open up another message here and you can see, even once you’ve read the email, you can come up to the top and find that snooze button again.

So, in this case, I’m going to say, actually, bring this back to me tomorrow morning.

It’s going to leave my inbox, and it will automatically return at the time I have specified. Now, if you’d like to address that email sooner, no worry, on the left-hand side here on the menu we have this snoozed option. If we clicked snoozed, it’s going to show us all of the emails that we have snoozed. It’s also going to tell us here on the right-hand side when it is scheduled to come back to our inbox, but we don’t have to wait for those times.

You can click on any of these messages and reply and do whatever you want with them. You don’t have to wait for that snooze time.

You can even come up here and say unsnooze which will simply bring it back to your inbox. Here it is again, and I can deal with it normally. Tip number three has to do with labels.

And on the left-hand side you can see that I have a number of labels here already, but I haven’t been using these labels very well here within my inbox. Labels can be a very effective way to differentiate the important emails or just categorize your emails in different ways. So, for example, if I click on this email again and I come up here and select the labels icon, I can choose from one of the labels that I’ve already created here. So, let’s say this is something I need to address, I’m going to select action required. Now when I go back to my inbox, it really stands out from the rest of my emails.

Maybe I have a few of these scattered throughout my inbox. I can see, you know what, I need to do something with this, I need to go back and reply to these. Now Gmail also makes it very easy for us if we winna select multiple emails, maybe these three emails, for example, I need to do something with later. I’m going to check their checkbox beside the message, come up here to labels and I’m going to say that, yeah, these are urgent. Maybe I’m going to use my label in this case, I’m going to say apply.

And now I have those labels here as well. So other way to make things stand out as you’re working through and getting through all of your messages. Now to go one step further than just adding labels manually, what we can do is actually add labels automatically and filter out messages. And the great thing about filtering within Gmail is we can and actually have certain messages skip the inbox, prevent all of this overload within our inbox and go directly to one of our labels here on the left-hand side. So, for example here, let’s say these click up notifications, maybe I don’t want to be seeing them here within my inbox I’d rather that they go directly to my newsletter label.

Well, what I’m going to do is I’m going to click up here on the search mail and I’m going to say, clickup.com, and I’m just going to hit enter in this case. And you can see I’ve got a number of these emails that have come back with it. What I’m going to do is I’m actually going to create a filter this time. So, I’m going to click on this little icon here that says show search options.

So, either I can search for the word, clickup.com or I could search for a specific address. In this example, I’m just going to use this term, clickup.com because almost all of their messaging is going to have that somewhere within the body of the email or perhaps the header or the footer.

Now, instead of hitting search here, which is just going to bring me back to the results that we see here.

I’m going to select create filter. And here is where the magic is going to happen. The very first option we have is skip the inbox in brackets, archive it, so I’m going to choose to check that, why? ‘Cause in the future, I don’t want any of these messages starting in my inbox. I winna come here to newsletters and read it when I want to.

So, in order to make that happen, I’m going to select apply the label. I’m going to choose the label newsletters in this case. And in this case, in this particular example, I’m also going to say, apply this filter to the 11 matching conversations. Meaning, those 11 conversations that are already in my inbox, I winna send them to this label. I want to send them out of the inbox and apply this label over here.

I’m gonna select create filter. So now when I come back to my inbox, all of those click up messages are gone, but if I click on newsletters, I can find them waiting for me here.

So, I can deal with them when I want to. Using and creating filters can be a very powerful way for you to manage an out-of-control inbox. Last but not least, I’ve saved something almost magical for the very end.

Here you can see that I’m using my test account where the email address is Scottftest1@gmail.com. But what Gmail allows us to do it allows us to add a plus symbol and then whatever we want after the first part of our email address, the first part of the email address, but before the @ symbol, why might this be useful to you? Well, let’s say that you’re signing up for a new account, or you need to submit your email address for a newsletter, you can identify who is using that email address. You can even filter on that email address if you want to in the future.

So let me show you how this works. Let me go to a different test email account, and I’m going to craft a new message.

So, let’s say that I’ve given an email address to a marketer, but instead of Scottftest1, I actually input Scottftest1 plus, and I’m going to say newsletter. Then I’m going to continue with my email address @gmail.com.

Okay, so this is what I’ve entered in, or this is what I’ve given someone, my actual email address but then I’ve used the plus symbol and then here you can add whatever you want. In this example, I’m saying newsletter@gmail.com. Let’s just type in newsletter test in this case and then we’re gonna send this message. What’s going to happen is I’m going to receive that in my inbox.

It may take just a second, but there it is. I received it here in my Scott test account. You can see that they input the correct email address. It has this +newsletter@gmail.com, but no matter what you put in here, it’s going to end up in your inbox.

So now I could filter on this if I need to, I could be a lot more specific and include the name of the app or the name of the website in which I’m setting up.

And I could go on to filter out these messages if I need to as well. So, if you don’t want to give your actual email address, you can use this plus symbol and add whatever it is you want. This can also be a great way of seeing if any of those services have shared or sold your email address to someone else. Well, I hope you enjoyed today’s video and the tips that were shared here.

If so, I would encourage you to subscribe right here to the SimpliVity channel. Thank you so much for watching today’s video and remember, being productive does not need to be difficult, in fact, it’s very simple.

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