How I use specific labels to manage my Inbox & To Do List

You are not alone in a society inundated with messaging. Texts, DMs, IMs, and E-mails bombard us everyday and all day. We are left to fend for ourselves in managing the cacophony of input requiring a thoughtful response. While I don’t have answers today on managing your personal or casual communications, I can provide you with a system I’ve implemented to manage my email inbox. 

Using labels to organize your Gmails is not a revolutionary choice to make. However, using them effectively in your inbox and sent mail can help manage what you are working on and what needs to be followed up on. Not only will this system help you, it doesn’t take up an excessive amount of time. Personally, I will use this system as a functional To Do list without rewriting what I need to do!

The system I utilize has two very specific labels: To Do & Waiting for Response. Any email in my current inbox is labeled as something I need to reply to - To Do or something I am waiting to hear more information on. As the flow of emails come flying in, I know to focus on those tagged as To Do and to worry about the other emails secondarily. If an email does not have a label, that means it is either new (and yet to be labeled) or the conversation has ended and the email can be archived/organized. In a professional setting, I keep every email and sort them out of my inbox. Because, at work, Gmail doesn’t have a limit, deletion is only intended for SPAM.

Now, To Do e-mails are not instantly the first emails that I respond to - I just remember that they are high priority. When I have managed all of my incoming traffic or handled my non-email work, those emails are first to tackle - typically, in date order.

Waiting for Response emails important to keep an eye on because this protects you from the nefarious “person I work with who won’t reply or is too busy to answer.” This is a friendly organizational tool to remind me to either follow up with that person by phone or in person. In some situations, this might lead to making an independent decision - because that person is too busy or not interested in being involved. I typically allow Waiting for Response emails to sit un-answered for a week - for colleagues that travel, are out sick, or have priorities, this is enough time to sort things out.

One final tactic using these labels is an e-mail tagged as To Do and Waiting for Response. An email that I label this way is normally a complex conversation that requires me to do something and to get a response on something. For our colleagues that write dense or complex e-mails, this is a friendly reminder to manage a specific question and to request an update. I try to keep this to a minimum to avoid label overload (it’s like when you read an academic book and highlight the entire page!).

I cannot emphasize enough, the value and efficiency provided by using labels in your inbox. Before using this system, I think many of my colleagues would publicly or privately bemoan my response time on emails. While this hasn’t solved this challenge completely, it has made prioritizing my inbox that much better. Hopefully, you can use this system in your work too!

(I cannot guarantee that this system is not uniquely my own. Because of our connected world, I am assuming I gleaned parts of this from other articles. Nevertheless, this system has worked for me and should help you too!)