Is keeping up with your email eating up all your spare time? For a while I felt like my email was taking over my life.
I use Gmail or Google Apps for everything but my work email. All of my Gmail accounts also synchronize to my iPhone. I keep my iPhone on and by my bed while I sleep and over the few years I’ve had it, I’ve gotten into a very bad habit of checking my email when I wake up (even if I’m waking up at a random time in the middle of the night).
If you’re anything like me, you probably get a ton of mailing list and automated emails. I have to go back 5 pages in my Gmail account before I get to any email conversations with real live people I know. Only 2 out of my most recent 250 email conversations are items that actually warranted a personal response.
That’s not to say that I didn’t want or need the other 248, but I certainly didn’t want or need to read them as soon as they arrived.
Over the past few months I’ve set up a filtering and labeling system so that only messages from my friends and family hit my inbox. Everything else is still there but at a lower priority.
To set up a filter:
- Check the box next to an email you would like to filter
- Click “more actions” > “filter messages like these”
- Adjust the criteria if necessary (then press the test search button if you made any adjustments to make sure your filter does what you want)
- Press “next step”
- Choose the actions you would like Gmail to take
- Check the box to apply the filter to all the other conversations that meet the criteria
- Press “create filter”
What actions do I set my filters up to do?
Gmail Labels
I label everything. Friends and family each get a unique label with their name and I use the Gmail Labs Custom Label Colors option to make each of those labels a bright color. The pastel label colors are assigned to various topics of automated emails that I may want to read at some point. The most interesting of those labels are in my short label list and I have a variety of others that I don’t expect to ever want to read along with my real people labels (which I don’t need in my short menu since they are in my inbox) in the “18 more” drop down menu.
Anything that isn’t a personal email from a real live person skips the inbox.
Any automated emails that I know I won’t ever want to read get marked as read. To find the emails that skipped the inbox but that you do want to read you can search for “is:unread” and Gmail will pull up all your unread emails – for this to work most efficiently though you need to mark all your old emails as read.
The only filter I set up that I really needed to edit Google’s guess at what the criteria should be was my “confirmation/receipt” label. Rather than basing it on what email address it comes from, I changed the criteria to search the message for the words “confirmation” or “receipt”.
To get started I set up filters for all of the emails I had received in the past week. That made a huge dent and then I just had to set up a new filter here and there as new emails that weren’t being filtered arrived to my inbox.
My personal email inbox has gone from receiving 25 emails a day that I feel pressured to read immediately to almost none (I do wish my friends would email me more often though, or maybe I wish I had more friends). I’m back in control and can read my email at my leisure.
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I look forward to following your site. If you send me a snippet of information about what your site and what you will your blogging focus will be – I will post on my website. Savings With Sadie.
Lisa
Carrie, thanks for tweeting about this post to me. I appreciate it. I’ve been using some of these tips (along with others from elsewhere), and I feel like it’s helping me to get a handle on my e-mail. Thank you.
09.02.2009 at 6:58 pm
Your very welcome. Filters have made a huge change in how I handle my own email (no more checking it on my iPhone from bed at 4am).
Carrie – can you help me? I’m new to gmail…and I’ve been planning an event.
Each time an rsvp came in I’d “move” it to a label.
I now would like to send a reminder to all of those who rsvp’d and can’t figure out how to email them all at one time.
Is there some way to click onto that label, check ALL and then email them???
Thank you!!
09.09.2009 at 8:15 pm
That’s a great question. I’m looking around for a way to do that and I can’t find anything. Google’s support section doesn’t have anything about it either.
My best suggestion is to click “Contacts” in the left sidebar of Gmail. Then go to “All Contacts”. Check the box next to the people you want to send your email to and then press the “email” link.
I also suggest that once Google pops those email address into the TO field of the email you’re going to right that you cut and paste them into the BCC field instead (put yourself in the TO field). This protects people’s email addresses from being shown to other people who they may not want to give their addresses to.
PS…what I thought I was doing by naming a label and placing all of my rsvp’s in that label was creating a group. Was I wrong to do that?
09.09.2009 at 8:16 pm
Yeah that doesn’t make a group. But if you follow my instructions above you’ll have the option to create that group before you press the “email” link.
01.31.2010 at 10:15 am
These are great tips, I’ll have to try filtering out my personal gmail account. It’s getting pretty wild nowadays.