10 Gmail Hacks to boost your productivity
Nope email is not dead and you better have to master it !

Email is dead! That’s what we have been telling a lot in the past few years. Let me be clear about this, I do use Slack, Facebook messenger and Twitter DM on a daily basis, but still I am pretty sure email is more alive than ever.
According to Radicati, the total number of business and consumer emails sent and received per day will reach 269 billion in 2017. And it should attain 319,6 billion in 2021 ! Google even said lately that Gmail count more than a billion active users.
So lets face it, you won’t stop spending hours and hours everyday dealing with email right now !!!
This being said, it’s never too late to start boosting your email productivity. And as Google free service is the most popular email service worldwide, let see how we can make this happen.
Here are some of my favorites Gmail hacks.
Send canned emails
If you send the same messages regularly, you might want to not rewrite it each time, right ? Then canned emails are the right pick for you :-) To enable canned emails go to Settings > Lab > Enable Canned Responses
When composing your message, click on the “more options” arrow at the bottom and save a Canned response.
Next time you want to reply with your Canned response, click on the same arrow and select your pre-defined answer. As easy as it seems to be !!!

Undo Send
Don’t need too much explanation, no ?! To unsend this very important email you just sent with a second grade grammar mistake, just click on the Settings wheel > General and search for Undo Send then Enable Undo Send and define the time you want to allow yourself to Unsend your email.

Enable “Priority Inbox”
When using email in a business context, the importance of emails matters. Really matters. So, you might want to get your most important email first. If yes then Enable the Priority Inbox.
To do so, go to Settings > Inbox > Inbox type > Priority Inbox

Send and archive
You already know that you will never come back to this email after replying, use send and archive.
To enable Send and archive, go to Settings > General > select Show Send & Archive button in reply.

Filter your search
Want to get a specific email faster than ever, use the Advanced Search Operators.
You only have to know some basic operators and start type them in the Search Box.

Most common (and useful, my POV) operators are :
from : search email from senders
to : search send to someone
has:attachment search for emails that have attachments
filename: specify the name of the file and you will find the email that contains this file
sent_before: / sent_after: / received_before: / received_after: Very useful when you know approximatively the moment you get or sent a specific email.
label: to identify a message in a specific label.
A complete list of Search Operators can be found here
Enable Keyboard shortcuts
Almost (if all) actions in Gmail can be performed using Keyboard Shortcuts. It can save you a lot of time to know some of them.
Here are my favs :
- c : Compose a new message
- d : Compose a new message in a new tab
- Shift +c : Compose a new message in a new folder
- Ctrl + Shift + c : Add jouter des destinataires en Cc
- Ctrl + Shift + b : Add des destinataires en Cci
- Ctrl + Shift + f : Change the sender address
- Tab + Backspace: Envoyer un message
- r : Reply
- a : Reply to all
- Ctrl + s : Save as a Dradft
- k: Go to a more recent email / thread
- j : Go to an older email / thread
- o ou Backspace : Open a thread
A complete list of Gmail Keyboard Shortcut can be found here.
Filter your emails
Gmail allows you to automatically perform some actions on your emails. For instance, you can Archive, Move to a folder, Mark as Important, Mark as Read some specific emails. Just click on the Search Box Arrow, specify the email you want to filter then click on Create filter with this search and select the action you want to perform. You’re all done !


Customize the labels menu
Labels is a pretty cool tool to organize our emails, I mean they are cool. But most of the time we create a label at some point in the time and then 2 years later it is not relevant anymore. But still your label is visible in your sidebar and make very hard to identify the labels that are relevant. Only one solution, customize the labels menu. Here is how to do that :
Go to Settings > Labels and choose to Hide or Show you different labels.

Mute conversations
Already been stuck in a conversation that is not relevant to you anymore. In a conversation where people continue to exchange emails but where you don’t have anything to do. If yes, the Mute Conversation option is made for you !
To Mute a Conversation in Gmail :
Click on More when looking at your email and then on Mute.

Enable Preview Panel
You are an Outlook user ? If yes, you surely like the Preview Panel display option that comes with Microsoft email client. Gmail allows you to display your emails the same way (almost).
To enable the Preview Panel mode, go to Settings>Labs>Enable Preview Panel.

EXTRA TIP : Clean up your inbox for good
One way to be much more productive when it comes to email is to make sure you have a sane inbox. And this is where I might help you with the solution I created a while ago, Neety, a web based smart email management solution.

I hope this few email hacks will help you to boost your email productivity and will allow you to save some of you precious time everyday.