Top 7 Gmail Tips for Productivity 📧

Key Takeaways

pretty cool right let's get started hi friends welcome back to the channel if you're new here my name is jeff and we're all about practical career interview and productivity tips if you're working professional consider subscribing for more actionable content in this video not only will i share seven gmail tips you might not have heard of before but i will also share very realistic use cases for each tip so you can become more productive at work or at school immediately starting off nice and easy with a simple gmail feature for productivity schedule send as the name implies you can schedule your email to be sent at a specific date and time in the future by clicking the small arrow next to the send button simple right this is particularly useful after informational interviews coffee chats and one-on-ones because a good follow-up email should always reference a few highlights from the conversation you want to write it down when the content is still fresh in your memory but it's also best practice to send the note a day after the chat takes place so write the email at 5 pm and schedule it to be sent at 9 30 the next morning pro tip you can also use this feature to schedule holiday greeting emails you can write a christmas e-card ahead of time and schedule it to be sent on christmas eve and have your friends and colleagues believe you were thinking about them on this special occasion but as spider-man has taught us with great power comes great responsibility so do not use this function to pretend you're working late or working weekends moving on to the second gmail tip searching for an external contact whose name you might have forgotten let's just dive right into an example in the search bar if i type in asterisks ey.com in quotation marks i see a list of emails from my colleagues from ey ernst young because the asterix is a search operator that stands for anything as you can imagine this is very powerful for job seekers and working professionals alike if you're looking for a job you might be networking with a lot of people and while you will remember what company they're from you might be a little bit hazy on their name if you're a professional working with external clients and partners there might be someone you haven't connected with in a while but you need to reach out to them because quarter end is coming and you need to hit your sales targets never happen to me but in both of those situations as long as you remember the company and the corresponding domain you should be good to go if you're enjoying these tips so far please drop a like and if not keep watching because we're going to now turn it up a notch google mail trip number three show labels only when they need attention whether you're inbox zero practitioner like me or you just have a lot of labels the left side of your email home page can get a little crowded after a while a very simple hack is to simply click the three dot menu and select show if unread this actually hides this label down in this hidden section right over here and it will only pop back up if an unread email is detected this is very handy if you pair this label with an automated filter speaking of filters the fourth gmail tip for productivity is a quick and simple way to create filters for entire mailing groups in my personal inbox i received these lovely emails from paypal that's totally not spam and while i do appreciate the 40 hong kong dollar vouchers i could do without the weekly notifications now if i click the three dot menu here and click filter messages like these gmail actually starts creating a filter for me i can customize it a little by adding has the words a voucher because i still want to receive my account statements just not the voucher emails i click search to confirm that i've just filtered out the paypal emails containing the word voucher yes and then i click create filter skip the inbox mark as read and also apply to six matching conversations and click create filter sorry paypal alright on to the really really fun stuff gmail tip and trick number five create infinite aliases using the plus sign so gmail has a super cool feature if you add a plus sign after your username and type in whatever you want gmail will still recognize that this email is meant for you a very practical use case is if you're out of office but still do not want to miss important emails simply let your colleagues know to send time-sensitive emails to your username plus ooo at gmail.com or whatever your work domain is and create a filter that labels emails sent to that address as urgent or you can sign up for newsletters and promotions using your username plus newsletter at and attach a filter that automatically skips your inbox and attach a label newsletter for example you won't get distracted by the emails hitting your inbox but you can still go into those labels and take advantage of those nice discounts if you really want to be sneaky you can use that company's name to sign up for their mailing list and if you receive an email to that alias from another company you might want to start asking questions by the way i'm on clubhouse where i dive deeper into all things career and productivity so make sure to follow me on there the sixth gmail tip for productivity is a gmail template hack if you find yourself sending the same email over and over again or just making minor edits each time what you want to do is go to gmail settings advanced enable templates and click save changes now when you write a new email you can create save modify and insert email templates right from the compose window this could be very useful if you have canned responses for different situations or you're responsible for sending newsletters with the same format each time the seventh gmail tip for productivity is to search your colleagues gmail for them yes it sounds creepy but bear with me this is an amazing trick to use in a professional workplace setting and your colleagues will love you for it if your manager pings you asking for an email or calendar invite they can't seem to find in their own inbox instead of telling them what to search for in the keywords and from fields make that search in your own inbox and copy that url and send it to them in a hyperlink format for example if i search for from calendar notification at google.com and agenda make the search press enter i can now copy this url and send that to my manager directly when he clicks that hyperlink the exact search parameters will run in his inbox saving your manager valuable time and showing him that you are a productivity guru and that you definitely deserve that next raise all right bonus tip for those of you who stuck around this far go to www.google.com dashboard to see some interesting stats about your google account i apparently have 7821 conversations in my gmail but because i use inbox zero i have none in my inbox it just doesn't show up here um i i have 356 apps installed that's kind of cool and over 15 000 photos awesome anyways i hope you're able to implement at least one of these tips today and let me know down in the comments which one is your favorite if you want to be more productive at work or at school check out my productivity at work playlist and subscribe for future videos on practical tips and tricks until next time bye