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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3 Tricks for Scheduling Due Dates in Record Time (in Omnifocus) [Video]
Omnifocus Series Part 3
(Psst…. Looking for the “missing tricks”? Look below!)
Have you ever realized that you could set due dates without looking at your calendar? Omnifocus has a nifty trick for due dates that will make your life easier. In this follow up to Part 1 and Part 2, you will learn about this useful hack so setting due dates in task managers like Omnifocus or Things is a snap.
Go to the inspector for Omnifocus and enter the due date you want without typing the month, day or year. Let’s say you have to meet someone named Karin “next Monday”. All you have to do is enter next Monday and Omnifocus will figure out the exact month, day and year.
This works for:
So on and so forth.
In fact, you can skip the typing in the full “Monday” and just use short forms like “Mon” or “mon”. Avoid shortening for “weeks” (avoid wk or wks) and even “years” (avoid yr or yrs) — use the full form for these ones.
If you want you can even specify the time. Here’s an example: ”2 weeks 5 pm.” Omnifocus figures out the date and time yet again. And this works well if you…
Have a Calendar!?
Specifically iCal that is. You can actually go to Omnifocus’ Preference menu, select the iCal icon and menu and setup the Sync.
If you have specified an exact time then Omnifocus will put the action item in the right time slot. If you want to setup alerts or reminders however you’ll have to do it right in iCal (Omni Group is probably working on that as we speak). Omnifocus can also narrow down which kinds of actions you want to put into the calendars and which calendars you want to put them into.
Watch out though because if you have lots and lots of items with due dates your calendars could become hard to read. Personally I tend to avoid using the sync because I have so many due dates that can come around (and the triple reminders that come with it).
If you want to set reminders, you can use the rule of 3 kind of like this.
Change it as needed. It’ll give you a leg up in getting to your appointments in time.
In Summary
Omnifocus can make setting due dates a lot easier. In fact this is a little trick I completely missed until just recently. I thought, “There must be an easier way!” Any how let me and the other visitors know about programs you use that already have this little trick built in because Omnifocus is probably just one of the few.
PS. Would love to put together a list of your most popular productivity programs! (Its probably changed since I last looked)
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