G Suite: Organize your Inbox
Email organization is clutch. It doesn't matter if you consider yourself a messy person in real life, having a neat email inbox will set you up for success. Gmail has some real neat tools to achieve the system that's best for you, we outline some tools at your disposal here.
TL;DR Best Practices
- Unsubscribe from any "News/Updates" from accounts associated with your email. They build up clutter and are rarely helpful
- Sort emails into folders / labels as they come in
- Archive emails that you're done with
- Delete emails that will never ever ever need to be looked at again (e.g. drive sharing notifications, calendar invites)
Inbox Type
Gmail by default offers a few methods of organization. Hover over inbox on the left hand side, click the dropdown arrow to pick between them. Options include:
- Default
- Emails are grouped into primary, social, promotions, and more, guided by Google's best guess. In the description of "default" you can manage which of these groups are displayed.
- Important First
- Google puts emails it believes are most important at the top; this is based on correspondence/read frequency, other habits you've developed. This is hit or miss.
- Unread First
- Obviously any unread emails are pushed to the top.
- Starred First
- If you're in the habit of starring immediately relevant emails, this is the one for you
- Priority Inbox
- Combination of starred, important
Multiple Inboxes
A great tool offered by google is Multiple Inboxes. To enable this functionality, navigate to Settings > Labs > Multiple Inboxes > Enable > Save
Multiple Inboxes allows you to create new sections on your main Gmail page, broken up however you like. This is especially recommended if you use labels. To configure these new views, navigate to Settings > Multiple Inboxes (added after you enable the lab).
Here, you can create new "panes" based on search criteria. The syntax here is the same used in the search bar above, so if you're trying to finagle something very specific try using the advanced search feature to see how Gmail would write it. A full list of search queries can be found here. A great guide to how to use multiple inboxes can be found here.
Google Inbox
True to form, Google has another way to organize your communication. Google Inbox is a mirrored copy of your email inbox, with a whole bunch of google's features wrapped up in there. Inbox transforms your email into a categorized tasklist of sorts. Inbox features include:
- Auto-sorted into promotions, forums, purchases, etc.
- Attachment quick view
- Snooze emails for later
- Integration with Google Reminders
- Minimal design
- Mass archiving
Either inbox works for you or it doesn't, trying to use inbox and gmail at the same time is probably nightmarish.