19 Most Effective Strategies On How To Organize Gmail (2024)

Are you drowning in a sea of unread emails? Wondering how to clean your email effectively? Let me share the secret with you. Learn the best way for you to organize Gmail in a way that makes sense for your life. You can have the benefits of a well-organized email account without the hassle of constantly sorting through clutter. Let's get started!

Table of Contents

• What Does It Mean To Organize Your Gmail Inbox?

• What Are The Benefits Of Organizing Your Gmail Inbox

• 19 Effective Strategies On How To Organize Gmail

• Complete Step-by-Step Guide On How To Use Ultra's AI Email Assistant To Organize Your Gmail

• Take Control of Your Email Inbox With Ultra — Get To Inbox Zero Daily

What Does It Mean To Organize Your Gmail Inbox?

Emailing is still a popular means of communication, especially in the business world, where an estimated 306 billion emails are received and sent daily. On average, each person receives around 120 emails a day. The flood of emails can hinder productivity if you have to waste time sifting through them to determine which ones are most important and require an immediate response.

You can become much more productive by organizing your Gmail. There are several ways to do this.

Filtering your emails

One of the best ways to organize your Gmail is to filter your emails using various parameters. By creating filters for emails that meet certain criteria, you can ensure that only certain types of emails go to specific folders. This way, you can avoid being inundated with unimportant emails.

Creating labels

Creating labels and using them to categorize your emails can make a huge difference. By categorizing your emails, you can quickly see which emails are related to which and address them together. This means you won’t have to waste time looking for emails that you have sorted into different categories.

Customizing your inbox settings

You can also customize your inbox settings to change what emails you see first. By setting different filters for your emails, you can ensure that the most important emails appear at the top of your inbox. This way, you can address these emails first and then move on to the less important ones.

Archiving emails

Archiving emails that you don’t want to appear in your inbox is also a great way to stay organized. By archiving emails, you can ensure that they don’t clutter up your inbox and distract you from the emails that require immediate attention.

Unsubscribing or blocking unwanted email senders

Unsubscribing or blocking unwanted email senders can also make a big difference in how organized your Gmail is. By preventing unwanted emails from appearing in your inbox, you can free up more time to focus on the emails that require your immediate attention.

Related Reading

• How To Delete Old Emails In Gmail

• How To Delete All Emails

• How To Manage Email Subscriptions

What Are The Benefits Of Organizing Your Gmail Inbox

Organizing your Gmail inbox can significantly enhance your productivity. When you take the time to prioritize and sort your emails, you eliminate the need to spend valuable time scanning through your inbox to identify the most important messages. This organization ensures that you can quickly identify the emails that are most critical to your work, allowing you to focus your attention on the tasks that matter the most. 

In fact, every time you stop what you’re doing to check your email, it takes about 23 minutes to get your focus back. By organizing your emails, not only can you save time spent on going through your inbox but also increase your focus and energy.

Better Time Management with Gmail Automated Organization

Automated Gmail organization can also help you manage your time more efficiently. Without proper email management, you may find yourself spending a significant portion of your workday in your inbox. By automating the organization of your emails, you can find it easier to manage your time more effectively and prioritize tasks. 

This allows you to focus on your work without getting sidetracked by email notifications or spending unnecessary time responding to less important emails. By saving time spent on browsing and replying to emails, you can manage your time more effectively and ensure that you tackle the most critical work tasks.

Timely Communication with Organized Gmail Inboxes

When your Gmail inbox is organized, you can identify important emails much faster. This enables you to respond promptly to your employer or address time-sensitive emails promptly. With a clutter-free inbox, you can quickly locate essential messages and reply to them in a timely manner, facilitating more effective communication and collaboration with your colleagues. By organizing your emails, you can improve the efficiency of your communication, ensuring that you respond promptly to essential messages and stay on top of your work responsibilities.

Enhanced Job Satisfaction Through Email Organization

An organized email inbox can lead to improved job satisfaction. By quickly identifying important work-related messages, you can focus on essential tasks and eliminate the stress associated with email overload and improper organization. 

This can help you enjoy your work more and experience greater satisfaction in your job. By organizing your Gmail inbox, you can improve your work efficiency, reduce stress, and enhance your overall job satisfaction. 

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19 Effective Strategies On How To Organize Gmail

1. Select Your Layout to Organize Gmail

The first step to organizing your Gmail is to select your preferred inbox layout. When you open your inbox, click on the gear symbol in the upper right corner and select “Settings.” Then along the top of the settings window, click on the “Inbox” tab. From here, Gmail gives you five layout options for your inbox.

Default

This is the standard format that organizes your Gmail by date an email is received. In this view, you can select different categories in which your emails are placed. They appear as tabs at the top of your screen and can be helpful in determining which of your emails are likely to be more important.

Important First

In this view, Gmail tries to predict which emails you are most important (noted with a yellow marker) and displays those messages in a top inbox. Your less important messages are displayed in a lower inbox at the bottom of your screen.

Unread First

This view is similar to the Important First option, however, your top inbox includes messages you haven’t opened yet, while the bottom inbox would include everything else.

Starred First

Your Starred First view also splits your inbox into two fields and displays only the emails you’ve starred in the top view. Everything else appears in the second view below.

Priority Inbox

This is like a combination of all of the views. Gmail uses predictive analysis to determine which emails you’re most likely to interact with based on past actions. It then puts those emails into the top view.

Finding a layout that works for you will help you keep your Gmail organized.

2. Get rid of tabs you don’t use much

You don’t have to have all five tabs inside Gmail. You can disable the ones you do not use much. The only tab you cannot disable is the Primary tab.

Here’s what you have to do:

• Click on Settings.

• From the drop-down menu, click Configure Inbox.

• Select the tabs you want to enable or disable.

Quick tip

If you disable a tab, its messages will appear in the Primary account. Permanently remove the ones that do not receive many emails. 

3. Organize email in Gmail using labels

You’ve probably used folders to sort your computer files. Gmail labels work like folders, but they’re better. Why? You can use different labels for one email and easily find it under these different labels. The email isn’t duplicated for different labels, saving you storage space.  

Here’s how to create a label in Gmail:

• Open Gmail on your web browser.  

• Scroll down on the left panel until you reach the ‘Labels’ heading.

• Click the ‘+’ icon.

• Add your label name and click ‘Create’.

Once you’ve created a label, you can categorize emails under it. Here’s how:

• First, open an email you want to label. 

• Click on the label icon.

• Categorize this email under a pre-existing label or create a new label for this email. 

4. Add a Preview Pane to Organize Gmail

The default view of Gmail just shows the sender, subject line, and a little bit of preview text before the row runs out of room. In most cases, you’ll need to open the email to determine if it was worth reading. 

You can save time and organize your Gmail by adding a preview pane. Click on the gear symbol and “Settings” from the dropdown. Then select “Labs” from the tabs that appear. Scroll down to “Preview Pane” and click enable. Save your changes and then you’ll have the option to see a preview of each email that comes in. 

5. Delete old attachments

Google users get 15GB of free space, which is shared between Gmail, Google Drive and Google+ photos. If you find yourself pushing the limit, deleting old emails with large attachments is an easy way to free up space.

To find these messages, go to the search box and click the downward-pointing arrow to perform an advanced search. To search for messages with an attachment, check the box that says "Has attachment" and hit search (you can also type "has:attachment" in the search box). To find emails that are larger than a certain size, regardless of attachment status, fill out the advanced search size parameters: under Size, choose "greater than," and enter in the size in bytes, kilobytes or megabytes and hit search.

6. Create nested labels

You can further organize your labels by creating nested labels, or sublabels. With sublabels, you can categorize messages with even more detail -- instead of simply labeling something "Work," for example, you can label it as "Work > Important Projects."

To create a sublabel, select a message and then click the Labels button. Click "Create new" and fill out your new sublabel's name. To nest the label, check the box marked "Nest label under," and choose a parent label from the drop-down menu.

7. Archive emails you do not need in the near future

A lot of times, we do not delete emails only because we might need them later. And then they keep piling up like there’s no tomorrow. To make this process even easier, use an online PDF maker that will allow you to save your email content as a PDF before archiving. 

This will allow you to keep access to important information without cluttering up your inbox. Archiving does not delete your email but removes it from your inbox. They remain searchable too. Select an email and look for the file-like icon at the top. Click it to archive.

8. Set up desktop notifications for new emails

If you’re in a customer-facing role, we’re pretty confident you get a lot of emails every day. If you prefer real-time engagement, we strongly recommend setting up desktop notifications. This way, messages pop up in the top right of your screen every time you receive a new email.

To enable desktop notifications, here’s what you have to do:

• Head to your settings (the gear icon at the top).

• In the general settings menu, scroll to ‘Desktop Notifications’ and click on the radio buttons to enable them.

Quick tip

Sometimes, desktop notifications can become annoying and distracting. To avoid falling into this trap, turn on desktop notifications for emails only marked as “Important.”

9. Use Multiple Gmail Accounts

You can create as many Gmail accounts as you want and for free, so there’s absolutely no reason not to have multiple Gmail accounts to separate personal and work emails. Gmail even comes with an incredibly useful feature that gives you a unified inbox for managing multiple email accounts, called Multiple Inboxes.

To turn on Multiple Inboxes, go to the Advanced tab under Settings.

• Click on Enable right next to Multiple Inboxes.

• Click Save Changes and wait for Gmail to reload.

• Go to the Multiple Inboxes tab under Settings to customize the Multiple Inboxes feature to show email sent to your other address.

10. Learn Gmail’s Keyboard Shortcuts

You can save a lot of time by navigating Gmail using keyboard shortcuts. Yes, it will take some time to memorize them, but you’ll thank yourself for making the effort once you discover just how easier it is to organize Gmail with keyboard shortcuts. Just keep in mind that keyboard shortcuts work differently on PC and Mac computers. On PCs, you'll use Ctrl instead of ⌘. 

Here’s a short list of some of the most popular keyboard shortcuts:

• Previous message in an open conversation: p

• Next message in an open conversation: n

• Send: ⌘/Ctrl + Enter

• Bold: ⌘/Ctrl + b

• Italics: ⌘/Ctrl + i

• Underline: ⌘/Ctrl + u

• Archive: e

• Mute conversation: m

• Report as spam: !

• Delete: #

• Reply: r

11. Use Dots in Your Gmail Address

You might have noticed that a misplaced dot in a Gmail email address doesn't cause the message to return to the sender undelivered. The reason why this happens is simple: dots don't matter in Gmail addresses.

From the point of view of Gmail, the following three email addresses are identical:

• johndoe@gmail.com

• john.doe@gmail.com

• j.o.h.n.d.o.e@gmail.com

You can use this Gmail quirk to your advantage by giving different email addresses to different people. For example, you can use the cleanest version of your email address for work, a version with a dot between your first name and your last name for communicating with friends

Even though Gmail ignores dots in email addresses, it's aware of their presence, so you can create filters to automatically separate different versions of your email address when they arrive and assign them colorful labels.

To filter a specific version of your email address:

• Click the Show search options (three lines) on the right of the Gmail search bar.

• Enter the email address in the To field.

• Click the Create filter button.

• Choose what to do when a message that matches your filter arrives.

• Click the Create filter button again.

Quick tip

You cannot place dots in the domain name, which is the part of your email address that comes after the @ symbol.

12. Explore Gmail Add-Ons and Extensions

Gmail has many useful email organization features, but there's still a lot that it can't do, and that's where Gmail add-ons and extensions come in. By installing the right Gmail add-ons and extensions, you can make Gmail even more powerful than it already is and organize your Gmail inbox in ways you never thought were possible before.

Here are three Gmail add-ons and extensions all users should know about:

Inbox Pause

This simple Gmail add-on allows you to pause your Gmail inbox until you're ready to receive more emails. It's perfect for those who often feel overwhelmed by the number of email messages they receive and would like to check email only a few times a day to boost productivity.

Checker Plus for Gmail

This Chrome extension lets you get instant notifications for multiple Gmail inboxes directly in your web browser. You can read or delete emails without opening Gmail, and the extension even has a built-in text-to-speech engine so you can listen to your emails and continue working on your task.

Auto Text Expander

Tired of typing the same phrases over and over again? Auto Text Expander can save you keystrokes by replacing shortcuts with phrases or entire sentences.

13. Add stars to important emails

Gmail allows you to add a star icon to flag important emails. While it automatically adds an “Importance Marker” (yellow arrow next to the star) to those it determines as important, you can manually add or delete stars. The more you manually add or delete stars, the better the Gmail algorithm becomes at detecting and flagging important messages. 

Here's how to add stars to important emails:

• Open your inbox or a conversation.

• Click on the star icon next to the email you want to mark as important.

• To see all your starred emails, click on “Starred” in the left panel of your inbox. 

14. Hit the unsubscribe button

Promotional emails are annoying. Evaluate how relevant are your current newsletter subscriptions. The whole idea is to organize your inbox better. Part of the process is reducing the amount of email stored but also reduce the number of emails that will arrive in the future.

See what subscriptions aren’t providing anything useful and get rid of those. 

A big chunk of a cluttered email inbox is made of subscriptions and newsletters we don’t even care. Sorting through these emails is time-consuming and will harm your productivity. There’s a considerable amount of tools you can use to unsubscribe from useless newsletters, which will save you a lot of time (and GBs) in your inbox, tools like Ultra.

15. Clean your Inbox consistently

To organize Gmail, you need to clean Gmail first. Something that you should keep in mind is, don’t be afraid to archive and delete old messages. The less you see, the better your productivity, so clean up those old messages. Basically, you should

Delete when you’re 100% sure that your conversation is finished and there’s no need to see it again

Archive when you might need this email in the future, but you’re done with it now.

16. Enable right-side chat

Right-side chat is another Gmail Labs feature, and it's an easy way to declutter your left column and maximize your screen real estate (especially if you have a wide screen).

To enable this, click the cog button, open the Settings menu and click the Labs tab. Under the Labs tab, find the feature called "Right-side chat," click "Enable" and then click "Save changes." Your chat list will move to the right side of the screen, opening up your left column for more labels and less clutter.

17. Turn on Nudges

Thanks to many spam emails, it is often straightforward to miss an important email on Gmail. The Nudge is an algorithm in Gmail that brings emails back to the top of your inbox when you or a recipient hasn’t sent a reply. It is excellent if you need constant reminders to send responses or follow-ups to important emails.

Nudges in Gmail are of two kinds:

Suggest emails to reply

Emails you might have forgotten to respond will appear at the top of your inbox.

Suggest emails to follow up on

Sent emails you might need to follow up on will appear at the top of your inbox
You can turn Nudges on/off under the “General” tab in your settings.

18. Mute Conversations

If you tired of getting stuck in email conversations between co-workers/customers that don’t necessarily involve you then the ‘Mute Conversations’ feature in Gmail is just for you. Mute a conversation in Gmail, and you won’t see any further messages related to it in your inbox. All emails added to the conversation after you’ve muted it will still be stored in your Gmail account but automatically archived. You’ll still be able to search for the discussion and view new messages.

To mute a conversation in Gmail, open the conversation and then click the “More” drop-down menu. Choose “Mute” from the list, and the dialogue is archived.

19. Reply to emails faster with Canned Responses

If you find yourself typing out the same email replies to multiple customers or co-workers, you should consider setting up Canned responses (templates).

Canned Responses are email templates that allow you to respond to emails with predetermined text. You can enable templates from the ‘Advanced’ tab in Gmail settings.

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• How To Mark Email As Important In Gmail
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