My inbox looks like this almost all day, every day:
Yay me.
And I do this through these three tactics:
- Using Slack with my team – if you’ve not tried slack yet, check it out here: Slack (link to slack website)
- Using Voxer with my team and clients – A walkie talkie app that speeds up ways to communicate (because talking is quicker than typing) – Voxer (link to voxer website)
- Using one clever filter in my gmail setup, to mark 90%+ of my emails read, before i even login…
And today, I thought I’d share the last one as a helper.
It’s called filters in gmail, and i setup a filter to catch every email that has “unsubscribe” in the footer (as every email marketing platform has to have).
Once it catches an email with unsubscribe in it, it marks it as read.
I can still scan my inbox once a day for everything marked read, to make sure i haven’t missed anything of value (usually the kids school telling me what they’ve got on tomorrow 🙂 )
But this single addition to my inbox strategy has cleaned it up so much, that the noise has gone, and i just get to see only things sent to me, important for me.
How To Add Automated Filters To Gmail
Here’s the steps on how to do it:
- In your gmail, go to the search bar, and search for the word “unsubscribe”
- Click Search
- After you’ve searched, on the right of the search bar, you will see a cross “X” and three horizontal lines, that represent the search settings – click those three lines
- You’ll now see a view like this – https://capture.dropbox.com/tNOk08XXVgv1v72F (put the picture in, not the dropbox link)
- See “Create Filter” at the bottom right? Click that
- Now you see this view – https://capture.dropbox.com/F9dN2txfO1WpJwtx (put the picture in, not the dropbox link)
- Now you can select “Mark as Read” to start, and I would select “Also apply filter to matching conversations” – once you’ve selected those two, click APPLY FILTER
- Now for every email that has unsubscribe, it’ll be marked as read, so you dont have to do anything with it
You’re welcome 🙂
As an extra, you can play with additional options there (ie archive it immediately via skip the inbox), but you might miss something when you do your once a day quick scan of all read emails, so i personally haven’t done that.
And if you didn’t know about filters before, you can also use them to forward certain emails to other mailboxes, or star anything from someone important – they’re just 2 of the functions i’ve used the filter for in the past.
I hope this little tip helps you free up a little bit more of your mental space each day, so you can spend your time on the things most important to you!
Bye for now!
Jamie