If you're like me, you get hundreds of new emails every day, not all important but mostly to do with the projects you're working on. And if you have that kind of email volume, you also don't have a lot of time to go through them and may resort to going through your inbox after the work day is over. Not good.

So here are some productivity hacks I've learnt over the past few years which will hopefully help you too.

Context switching

Before jumping into it, there's one topic which is important to cover. Context switching - actually quite an expensive thing to do, specially when you have multiple projects running in parallel. It's mostly because our brains are terrible multi-taskers, but life demands it anyway. I won't go into too much detail, there's a lot of content online and many studies done on this topic. I'll just leave you with a simple test you can do yourself.

Take a sheet of paper, create three columns on each side of the page. The activity is easy, you'll do it twice and time yourself each time. You're going to write down the numbers 1-10 in the first column, the Roman numerals i-x in the second column and the letters a-j in the third column. The first time you do it, go row by row, meaning you write 1, i, a then 2, ii, b and so on. Don't forget to time yourself. The second time, go column by column, meaning you write 1,2,3… then i,ii,iii… then a,b,c…to finish. You'll hopefully be able to see the performance improvement quite significantly. And this will see the basis for why I do certain things as part of my Gmail workflow.

Set up filters & labels

Yes, obvious one but we start with the basics. I don't have filters and labels set up for everything as that wouldn't sit nicely with the rest of my “inboxing workflow”, but do have them set up for the following things:

Automated update emails

These are quite easy to filter and go through in bulk. The list below is actually what I've named my labels. Emojis help with ordering the labels nicely too. For some, I just add the labels to the emails without archiving them to make them more noticeable in my inbox. For others I archive out of my inbox.

📅 Cal

• Label & Archive
• This takes all the calendar updates out of my inbox, and I usually just mark everything as read after a quick scan

🔔 Updates

• Label only
• I use this mostly for the comment notifications that come from Google drive

🗞️ News

• Label & Archive
• All my subscriptions go in here, makes for a nice morning read

🐞 Bugs

• Label only
• All the updates from the project management tool I use

Team aliases

I've got a separate Google group set up for each of my teams, and filler them accordingly. Usually name the labels like this:

T: Team America

T: Avengers

T: TMNT

These emails are usually lower priority for me, and because I used emojis for my other labels, they appear lower down the list. I both label and archive these emails.

How to set up filters

I set up one filter for each label. The most complex one being my “🗞️ News” label. I've got many subscriptions to newsletters both internally and externally to my company. But in order to make updating filters more manageable for the future, I group everything into one filter rule (by using a lot of logical OR - the “|” character). An example filter would look like this:

from:(news@sub1.com|news@sub2.com|news@sub3.com)

Now if I want to modify it, it's all in one filter rule.

Don't also forget to filter out

This mostly applies to my team aliases - engineers get a lot of automated system updates that I don't need to read. So I've got a filter set up to mark as read and archive those kinds of emails. This makes it easier to read through just the emails that are unread and relevant to me.

My inbox workflow

Even after all the filtering, I still end up with around a hundred emails in my inbox every day.

Priority inbox

Gmail's priority inbox does an ok job at dividing your inbox into two - the things you should read, and the thinks you can probably skip. But in order for this to work properly, you need to train Gmail by marking emails as important or not important. Even then, if you're working on multiple projects, a simple division by 2 isn't going to help much.

Aggressive archiving

Every morning on my commute to work I scan through my emails and archive the ones I don't need to read or follow up on. Sometimes just reading the subject and first few sentences gives me the gist of the email, so I usually tackle those too. This actually reduces the number of emails I have to actually do something with by half.

My “📥 TRIAGE” label

As you know I like going through similar emails together, and depending on when emails are sent, they appear as a soup in my inbox. So I've set up a “triage” label for myself, and create temporary nested labels under it for different topics or projects I work on. Each morning when I get to my desk I go through triaging my inbox on my laptop (basically reduce it to zero emails) and later find time to go through each new group of emails I've created a label for.

Using the keyboard shortcuts (you'll need to enable this in settings), this is actually very quick:

• Use the up/down arrows to navigate threads
• Use “X” to mark emails
• Use “L” to open the label drop down, you can either search for existing labels, or create new ones
• Use “E” to archive

The labels will appear in the sidebar along with the number of emails in each label. I usually use that to prioritise which labels to tackle when.