As of 2018, there were 1.5 billion active Gmail users.
If you’re one of those billions of Gmail users, you might be curious if there are any tips or shortcuts to enhance the productivity of your work. You can track, snooze, compose and automate incoming emails. You can use the Gmail tracker to get notifications when your contacts open your emails. Thankfully, there are plenty of them, so keep reading to find out what they are!
Thankfully, there are plenty of them, so keep reading to find out what they are!
1. Snooze Emails
If you’re too busy at work to answer people’s emails, you can actually snooze them. This is great for emails that you want to respond to later but doesn’t have the time to right now.
The snooze feature in Gmail makes sure that you see all of your emails and even remember to reply to them. When you’re ready to answer all of them, Gmail will send you a notification reminder.
It’s actually a very easy feature to use as well. All you have to do is right-click on a message. If you want to snooze it, you can choose when you want to answer it.
At whatever time you set, Gmail will then send you a notification.
2. Use Smart Compose
Another way to enhance work productivity is to use the Smart Compose Feature. This is one of the more recent hacks for Gmail.
While you’re typing, you’ll find that Gmail will suggest common phrases, which you may have already been about to type. If you want that suggested phrase, all you have to do is press the Tab key to accept it.
If you don’t want their suggestion, just keep typing and it will go away.
To turn this on, you can go to your General Settings tab. From there, you’ll be able to see the option for Smart Compose. You can turn that button on.
If you turn it on and realize that it’s not predicting your phrases accurately enough, you can even give it suggestions to help predict what you’re going to say more accurately.
3. Use Keyboard Shortcuts
One of the best Gmail tips and tricks is to use keyboard shortcuts. There are all kinds of helpful keyboard shortcuts that you can use.
For example, if you’re looking at an email thread that has hundreds of messages for different replies under one subject, you can use the semicolon key to open the entire conversation.
This will show every message in the thread. Once you find the one you’re looking for, you can hit the colon key to collapse it and only look at the last email you received.
However, this will only work if you’ve enabled the option for a keyboard shortcut in your settings. You should be able to find the option for that in the same place that you turned on your Smart Compose option.
4. Set Up the Priority Inbox
When it comes to enhancing productivity, you should also set up some folders, including your Priority Inbox.
This helps you sort all of the really important messages you need to the top of your Inbox. You can activate this setting, but in general, you’ll find all of your emails separated into three categories: Primary, Social, and Promotions.
However, if you go into the settings, you can even further decide what is important and which Inbox section you can go. This is great if you come back from vacation and have a ton of emails.
This will help you easily go through them and find out what the most important conversations were.
To learn more about how to set up your inbox and other folders, click here to find out more!
5. Use Labels
If you don’t want to use folders to organize your inbox, you can also use labels.
This will help to set a filter that you can apply to a set of common emails. It will also make sure that you can filter out anything that isn’t relevant or that you don’t need.
For example, if you get a lot of administration emails, you can create a label and tag them as “Administration.” This way if you ever need to find something relating to that, you can easily go to the tag and find it.
To create labels, scroll to your left sidebar. You should see an option that allows you to create a new label. Name the label and choose if you want to place it under another one.
You can even assign a color to it so that you can easily find it when looking at your Inbox.
6. Use Google Calendar
Gmail also works closely with Google Calendar, so if you use Google Calendar to plan everything, you can even have a better workflow in your email as well.
Gmail can send you reminders for meetings, events, and any other things you might have planned. Everything that is in your Google Calendar is automatically attached to your Gmail, and vice versa!
7. Know How to Search Your Emails
Lastly, there is a simple way to learn how to search through all of your emails easily.
However, you can use some short “phrases” to easily find what you’re looking for.
If you type in “older_than:xd” but replace the x with a number, this will search through your inbox and pull any emails that are older than the x amount of days.
If you want to search through your chats, you can type in: “Is:chat” to see all of your chats from any Google apps.
Discover More Ways to Enhance Productivity With These Gmail Tricks
These are only a few ways to enhance productivity with these Gmail hacks and tricks. But there are many more!
We know that organizing your email and increasing your workflow can be difficult at times, but we’re here to help you out!
If you enjoyed this article, make sure that you explore our website to find more articles just like this one.
Andrea Parker is a reporter for Zobuz. She previously worked at Huffington Post and Vanity Fair. Andrea is based in NYC and covers issues affecting her city. In addition to her severe coffee addiction, she’s a Netflix enthusiast, a red wine drinker, and a voracious reader.
