Two quick ways to better organize your Gmail inbox

While at work some time ago, I fooled around with Gmail after sending out some emails and discovered some cool things. If you like to keep your emails sorted and organized like me, you’ll probably enjoy these two simple ways to keep your emails a bit more manageable.

1. Stars
   I despise reading emails, finding out that I do not have enough information to answer the email just yet, but have it “read” in my inbox. For the longest time, I would either mark the email as “unread” to let myself know I have to tend to it soon or click the yellow star and mark it as “important”. That is until I discovered Gmail “stars”. There are so many more options! Let me show you what I mean…
   Once you’re logged into your Gmail account, click on the “Settings” flower button on your top right corner. You will be on the “General” page. Scroll down until you see “Stars”. GENIUS. I’ve been using the red star to symbolize something more important than the yellow (rarely use the yellow star anymore), the “yellow-bang” or exclamation (!) mark to mean something SUPER important, the “purple-question” (?) mark to signal something that needs an answer, the “orange guillemet” to let myself know that I’ve forwarded a certain email along to another colleague, department, etc. Take these beauties and make up a system that works for you! Choose and drag the ones you want to use and save changes on the bottom.
2. Inbox type
   If you do not regularly clear out your inbox or regularly file away emails to folders, your inbox can quickly get cluttered and messy. Our inboxes on Gmail are normally on “Default”. This means you can choose which email you want to see first, like messages you haven’t read or ones marked important. There are two ways to do this:
   a. When your Gmail inbox is open, hover over “Inbox”. Click the down arrow and choose an option:
   i. Important first–puts all email marked important at the top of your inbox
   ii. Unread first–puts all unread email at the top of your inbox
   iii. Starred first–puts all starred email at the top of your inbox
   iv. Priority inbox–combines and separates your important email into 3 sections: important and unread, starred, and everything else.
   OR
   b. Click on the “Settings” flower button on the top right corner. Click on the “Inbox” label.
   i. There’s a navigation bar next to “Inbox type” with options we just went over in part a. for you to select from.

These two ways keep my inbox a lot tamer and I hope they can do the same for you. Feel free to share some tips you may have below in the comment box!

Happy inbox managing,
Sylvia