Photo via Dr. Ottematic

What’s 1 way to avoid tearing out your hair when cleaning up your email inbox?

A Priority Inbox

Google just created a Priority Inbox setup for Gmail users.  In fact, Jennifer Van Grove at Mashable even gives you 5 tips on how to make it a more productive tool for you.

Google is Set to Launch Priority Inbox: “‘During the many months of testing the feature internally, the search giant found that users spent 16% less time reading insignificant e-mail. If you do the math, that’s about a full week’s worth of time saved.’”

(Via Workplace Learning Today.)

Hey if you can save a week’s worth of time for something else (like the bar or squash) that’d be awesome right?

Mark Ouseley, a friend of mine on Facebook had this to say about Priority Inbox:

@Mark Ouseley I greatly appreciate this new gmail priority inbox, it is nice having google do the sorting for me. Do give it a go.

1.  Fish Nets

Think of the new inbox as a way to make your own fish net.  A fish net to catch all those important or bad emails that come your way.  Look for “Create a Filter” option.

Go here:

And then here:

The priority inbox also has quick buttons to choose “Important” and “Not Important”

Bang, your own your way to creating fish nets.  Then you can…

2.  Change Up the Desk

Put your important stuff, super important (starred) stuff and “everything else” where it belongs.  All you have to do is look for “More options…” labels.

When you first decide to try it out it gives you:

If you need to create more boxes outside of your starter boxes then look for something like:

3.  Clean Up Your Desk

If you find that all the stuff you have to do (everything you big yellow “star”) is finished and starting to create clutter you can clear it out.

Jennifer’s picture shows it best.

Select the stuff you want to trash and voila, it’s gone like a poof of smoke.

4.  Turn the Inbox into a Filing Cabinet

Okay, Jennifer has literally overkilled me because she’s using Multiple Inboxes, another Google hack that turns your inbox into a massive filing cabinet.  See Jennifer’s article for more details since I’ve yet to try this one out.

In Apple Mail, I just create more inboxes right from the get go or create “smart mailboxes”.

5.  Make Gmail Do the Heavy Lifting

If you’re using Multiple Inboxes from tip 4 then you can make Gmail do more lifting for you.  What this tip does is make Gmail send mail to the right inbox.  Frankly, it’s like Smart Rules or Rules in Apple Mail and other email programs that you’d use for your computer.  They’ve just figured out (finally) how to do it for Gmail.

Again check out Jennifer’s article for the nitty gritty details.

Personally, Priority Inbox looks useful for people who use their web browser for email a lot.  Me?  I use email programs on my Mac, iPad or iPhone.  The main thing I wish the computer programs had is Google’s new way of figuring out what you like reading most and automatically making that come to the top of the pile.

Something for Apple Mail, Mozilla Thunderbird and others to learn from.

What do you think of Google’s latest improvement?

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