| Taking Control of Email |
If your like me you probably has used your Gmail account like a message repository since day one. The bad thing is 2700 days later (give or take a few dozen) you end up with a seemingly endless number of messages. Of which you can't tell the "Family Vacation to Texas" pictures from the "Pick up some milk on the way home" ones. This problem is mitigated a lot by the awesome search features built into Gmail as well as the Gmail-ers best friend "Priority Mail Box". But still you need a little order in your life. It would be nice open up your mail Gmail Inbox and only see a few things that matter you you and not the "1 of Many" notifiers you get when you have pages upon pages of messages just stuck in your Inbox. Now if your an email Samurai like Gina Trapani you could go though your entire Inbox and read (or at least eyeball) everything. But I'm not a business (yet) and while I may care about people I don't like most of them to stay interested that long in what they are saying. So the only thing that is left is of course the Nuclear Option.
The Nuclear Option
A lot of people don't know that the Inbox is actually just a label. Whenever email is delivered to your Gmail account it is labeled "Inbox" and unread. Reading an email marks it read but it stays in your Inbox. On way to remedy this is to use your Archive function.
Archive is just another label. Just less prominent. Everything is still in your mailbox but if your archive a message it is just put to the background. It is still searchable and not deleted. This is where the leap of faith comes in. On your left hand Gmail navigation bar you need to hover over Inbox and scroll down until you get to the more drop down. Click on More and you will see "All Mail". Click on "All Mail" and all your mail messages sorted by date should appear. Now just under the search box above your mailbox you should see a grey box with a square in it. This is your select box. Click on it and choose "All". This will select all the emails in the browser window. Now here come the hard part. Just above your first email you will see the words "All 100 conversations on this page are selected. Select all (some number) conversations in All Mail". Click the highlighted part. This will select every email in your mailbox. Now hit the "e" key to Archive all your messages.
Oh My God!!! Did I just say archive everything? But ... where will my messages go? Simmer down now. You can see everything again just by going to All Mail as described before or going to your Archive label. And like I said everything is searchable. Which are small prices to pay for the ability to click on your Inbox and see... Nothing. Total order and silence. Yes this would be like moving all humans to Mars so you can have some breathing room. But it works. Now when you open up your mailbox you know what is in there is new or important. Plus it is a lot easier to clean an almost empty mailbox weekly than going though tens or hundreds of thousands of mail messages.
Yes there are tons of messages in my mailbox that you probably didn't read. And some would consider that rude. But really were you ever going to read them? How important is a unread "How are you today" email form a person you don't even date anymore from 2008? Not very. So start new. I know I'm doing this every Jan 1 from now on. Last year was a year ago. Time to move on. And job one every Jan 1 from now on is Gmail cleaning. And just to help you along here are some quick gmail shortcuts you can use to plow though your messages and stop emails from piling up again.
Archive a message - "e"
Delete a message - "#"
Next Message - "j"
Previous Message - "k"
Star a message - "s"
Mark as Important - "= or +"
0 comments:
Post a Comment