Productivity Hacks — Part I (Gmail + Slack)
People sometimes joke that I’m an early-adopter, have way too much energy and/or have too much time on my hands (last one, definitely not true).
The truth is; I love to try new things, because I’m always looking for better, faster, more efficient ways to get stuff done and save myself time.
I’m a huge promoter of efficient workflows and always willing to help anyone out to try to optimise what they’re doing. Often it is not easy, as each one of us has a different way of thinking, learning and processing their daily information overload.
The below are all examples how I like to organise my daily routine, which does not mean that you will like it or it will work for you — you most likely are going to want to tweak it to match your style of working. I still hope that you can take away some useful tips!
Let me know what you think and if you have any cool tips and tricks - and if you're even interested in Part II and Part III.
— I’d love to learn from you!
Content
Part I - Gmail
- Structure your Inbox
- Show me more messages!
- Compact — show me even more!
- AutoFilters — let Gmail do the work
- Undo Email — the Lifesaver
Part I - Slack
- Adjust your notifications
- Know your shortcut — Cmd+K
Part II - Phone & Trello
Part III - Google Sheets > Excel
Part IV - Quality enhancing Productivity Tools
Part V - Speed enhancing Productivity Tools
Gmail
Structure your Inbox
Your inbox is most likely the first place you will go to every single day. I advocate for a one-touch system. You enter your inbox, you read your ‘Unread’ messages and you either:
- Reply — no further action required, messages go into ‘Read’
- Don’t reply — as there’s no need to; message becomes ‘Read’ and drops out of your inbox
- Star the message — as it’s a bigger task you might have to work on later
By doing this you can manage your Inbox 0 goal, stay on top of urgent items and you know what’s important (Tip: starred messages).
How to do this?
- Gmail > Settings
- Inbox > Select Priority > See Picture
This will make your inbox look like this:
Done — now, try to not get flooded with emails, by sorting through them when you have time. Deal with them straight away, or star them for later.
Show me more messages!
The default for Unread and Starred messages is to show only 10–25 items — I’d recommend changing that to 50, so you’ve got everything in one spot.
Compact — show me even more!
I like to get an overview of what’s happening in my inbox at one glance. To do that switch to ‘Compact’ view rather than the default ‘Comfortable’.
This will consolidate your emails and show you an extra 25% of emails.
You go from the screen on the left to what you see on the right.
AutoFilters — let Gmail do the work
There are two use cases for this:
1) Create Folders
As in the above examples, you can create ‘labels’ / folders, which automatically folder away your messages and apply colour labels.
Example: In the above screenshots you can see how I apply an automatic label to all my Tech Newsletters → makes it simple for me to then click on the folder and go through all my newsletters.
In Gmail’s settings (as above), go to:
Gmail > Settings > Filters and blocked addresses
Enter email address you receive the newsletter from (use OR if you want to input multiple - see above screenshot)
1. Apply the label; 2. Apply to previous matches; 3. Create filter
On the left side of your inbox, give your label a colour — to easier identify it
Voila — all your emails coming from a particular sender will be automatically labelled as ie orange “Newsletter”.
2) Mark messages automatically as ‘Read’
Now you know how to make simple labels — the next step is where the real magic happens. Often our emails are spammed with messages, which you want to see, but don’t spend time clicking through each one of them.
Example: “XX accepted your meeting” — if you send out a meeting invite you, will receive that email from all 20 participants, but you’re only really interested in the ones who ‘decline’ it or tell you they ‘might be’ attending.
You can set up a filter, which automatically marks every “XX accepted your meeting” email as ‘Read’, so you don’t have to do it anymore, but you will still receive ‘maybes’ and ‘declines’ in your inbox.
Every email which starts with the Subject line: “Accepted: “ will be filtered
-> “*” is a wildcard so the filter does not need to be an exact match, but only emails ‘starting with the provided phrase’
Emails starting with ‘Accepted: ‘ will be 1. Automatically marked as ‘Read’; 2. Labelled as ‘Meeting — Accepted’
This little trick will save you a couple of seconds for every meeting people accept from you, which adds up depending on how many meeting invites you send out.
Avg. 5 meeting invites to 4 people / week = ~20 accepted/week = 80 accepted/month = 960 accepted/year @ 3 seconds to open and close email
= 50 minutes / year saved
of course way more, if you send meeting invites to 10–20 people on a regular basis
Undo Email — The Lifesaver
Have you ever sent an email and as soon as you hit ‘Send’ — you wish you never sent it because either it had spelling mistakes or you just realised it was wrong.
Gmail has that as a standard function to send the email with X seconds delay so you can still retract emails.
Gmail > Settings > General > Enable Undo Send > Adjust the time you need
As soon as you send the email, a little yellow bar appears the top of your inbox and allows you to retract your email for X seconds and only then it will be sent.
Click on ‘Undo’ to make changes to your email before it’s sent.
Saves my life about once a month.
Slack
Slack is an awesome tool for quick messaging, rapid responses and small questions — it 100% will save you time moving away from one-liner emails to Slack.
I’ve got two tips for Slack:
1) Adjust your notifications
In each channel — especially the big ones in ie #general — adjust your notifications, so you don’t get spammed
On each Slack ‘Organisation’, you’ve been added to, adjust your Preferences
The one worth reviewing is the ‘Do Not Disturb’ function
2) Know your Shortcut — Cmd+K
I know a lot of people who hate Slack and I completely understand it. I didn't like it at first either and thought it was confusing to have so many different channels.
It all changed once I figured out this shortcut 'Command + K' (for Mac), which allows for super quick navigation.
You can jump between channels and conversations and get answers in lightning speed.
What did you think? Was this useful?
Do YOU have any other tricks you use?
Any requests of what I should cover in future parts?