How do I cope with having 122,602 emails in my inbox?

It wasn’t too long ago that my inbox was my to do list - any message that wasn’t neatly and painstakingly filed away into a specific folder was deemed to be an outstanding task. I even had four folders which I used to hold tasks that I didn’t have time for at the moment:

• Important & urgent (dealt with first)
• Important & not urgent (these should be dealt with second but often slipped to third)
• Not important & urgent (should be third on the list)
• Not important & not urgent (never found the time to get around to these)

I would break out into a cold sweat if my ‘live’ inbox reached a dozen or so message as I felt I wasn’t able to stay on top of my tasks.

Fast forward to today and I have over 120,000 messages in my inbox, manually apply a label to less than 1% of all incoming messages and yet everything is calm in my world (well, mostly anyway!). How has this been achieved?

A number of important things have happened. Firstly, I started using G Suite as my corporate office productivity tool and Gmail really has transformed the way in which I interact with my messages. Secondly, the adoption of other technology (notably chat) has significantly reduced the volume of messages (I currently receive around 400 per day). Thirdly, and in some ways most importantly, I have changed my attitude towards emails and how I handle them.

The introduction of G Suite was the catalyst for this change. I had spent the previous 12 years as an Outlook devotee and had become used to the static and linear process of email management. Gmail changes that and encourages it's users to consider email inboxes to be a consistent flow of messages, some which need to be dealt with and others which don’t. Automating many of the tasks which were previously manual - such as message labelling and categorization - means that only important messages are bubbled up to the top for me to consider what to do with them. The remainder flows past in a delightful change of priority which speeds up the whole process.

Chat has become more and more prevalent in my communication stack. I use Google Chat for internal communication and Hangout for external (these should be consolidated in the coming weeks to make it even easier). Notifications and quick messages which were previously email are now chats and much easier to deal with.

Top tips for Gmail users

Consider using the tabbed view, which automatically categorises messages between what are priority, social, updates and forum messages. It also does a great job of segmenting promotional messages from the important ones. Not everyone likes this view it it works wonders for me.

https://support.google.com/mail/answer/3094499?co=GENIE.Platform%3DDesktop&hl=en

Also this neat add-on which allows you to create your own tabs from your labels:

https://www.gmailtabs.com/

Another useful tip is to make use of the filtering capabilities of Gmail. Use filters to automatically apply labels (think of labels in Gmail as folders in Outlook), read unimportant messages, archive messages from your inbox or anything else which helps you concentrate on the important messages.

Use the snooze facility in Gmail. Before emails and the onset of the fabled paperless office (does anyone have one of those yet?), the advice was to only touch each piece of paper once. See it, deal with it was the message - it wasn’t always practical but the principle was sound. Another tip was to mark a cross everytime you picked up a piece of paper but didn’t deal with it - once you got the three marks it had to be handled. The snooze button in Gmail can be similarly abused but it is a good way to remove a message which you can’t deal with now safe in the knowledge that it will return when you wish.

https://gsuitetips.com/tips/gmail/use-the-snooze-button-in-gmail/

Use Smart Compose and Smart Reply as often as possible. Smart Compose uses the Google AI algorithms to guess what you are going to type - and completes the text for you. Smart Reply gives you short, sharp replies to the messages you receive. Both of these tools can seem a little freaky to begin with but hang on in there - they can save a heap of time.

https://www.blog.google/products/gmail/subject-write-emails-faster-smart-compose-gmail/

Learn your keyboard shortcuts - they too can be a time saver when dealing with high volumes of emails.

https://gsuitetips.com/tips/gmail/some-of-the-best-gmail-keyboard-shortcuts/

Use canned responses, there are email templates which can be a life saver if you often send the same message to a number of recipients. A high number of messages of the same nature should probably be handled by another system (MailChimp, Snov.io etc.) but a lower volumes, canned responses work a treat.

https://gsuitetips.com/tips/gmail/canned-responses-in-gmail/

Mentions in emails - similar to the way this works in chat, adding +[contact name] and selecting their email address will add them into the conversation. You could add them in the address bar but this is easier when you are in the email body.

https://gsuitetips.com/tips/gmail/mention-a-contact-in-gmail/