Advanced Gmail tips

Some advanced Gmail tips to simplify work and emotional life

Managing email flow became part of workers (students, managers, even freshers) daily job. But, the email is not free - it is a hard task to read and respond to an email. see https://hbr.org/2013/04/email-is-not-free#.

In the above article, Tom Cochran identified that it cost 95 cents (of labor costs) per email. So, if you have worked on 100 emails per week, then it is $95.

Tip: Shallow email reading affects our attention residue and decrease task efficiency.

Email how-to

1 Sending email 📤

Always schedule send an email at least one hour. Of course, it depends on what work you do. I am a bridge designer, so one hour works for me.

Table - Email schedule template

Scenario	Hours
For sure emails and urgent	1 hrs.
For sure emails and not urgent	12 hrs.
Not sure emails and not urgent	24 hrs.
Not sure emails and urgent	Is it necessary?

2 Creating a filter

Let us say you want all your bank statements to go into the archive, then filter will do.

Method 1: Do it from the search bar

Method 2: Do it right on the email

3 Labels 🔖

Table - example labels for emails

Name	Description
work	Job related
friends	Discussion with friends
transactions	bill receipts bank transactions, trading etc.

4 Snooze ⏰

To get predictive responses use scheduling with snooze. It will activate the email after certain time. Email anxiety is real!

Snooze the email by the following time. If you feel anxious by various emails snoozing will help.

Table - snooze schedule

Type	Time
Personal	12 hrs.
Project email	12 hrs.
Support emails	2 business days

House keeping 🧹

Cycle time

Every three months, decide the mails that are essential and archive them. Discard the remaining. Four times a year.

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