Organize Your Email in GTD Spirit

Despite the fact that we have so many different messengers, to-do apps, calendars, and other tools to improve our productivity, emails are still the foundation for almost any person. Almost all companies use it to communicate important messages inside the company and with their users. And even if the core element in your company is Slack/gChat/Discord or something else, I bet you still get a lot of work-related emails. The same for personal use cases — although, we don’t use it to communicate with our friends and families anymore (at least not that often), we still use it to get various information starting from digests from different newsletters to health and bank alerts.

And emails may be so powerful tool to organize your life as it’s so easy to make a GTD beast out of it! Here, I’m going to focus on Gmail as a mail client, but I’m pretty sure that a similar can be done with other clients as well.

What Is GTD?

If you’re not familiar with GTD, let me highlight its important aspects of it. Get Things Done (GTD) is a very popular productivity methodology that helps to organize your items to do. I personally found it around five years ago and have been using it since then. I didn’t use it by the book and made some modifications, but the fundamental concepts are still there:

• Everything you want/need to do goes in the “inbox”.
• You periodically review your inbox (decide what you need to do with this item — either delete it, add an actionable next item, or place it in the “later”/”knowledge” folder). Try to do it every day or week.
• You can select any actionable item whenever you have time and just do it!
• Regularly review other folders (like “later” or “knowledge”) to remove some obsolete data. Try to do it every month or quarter.

So, it’s clear from this description that you can use it with just papers and several actual boxes. And this approach was recommended (at least last time I read the book). But being a geek, it’s hard for me not to use the internet and web services. So, I use my mail service to have these different boxes (categories) of paper (emails).

So, my Gmail usually looks something like that (yes, white theme, I know):

Final Gmail look

Here, I’m going to describe each step in detail to make your mail powerful, let’s go!

Multiple inboxes and labeling

First of all, as you probably noticed in the picture above, there are multiple inboxes. On the left, you have your regular inbox where all new emails get to. On the right, you have three more to organize things to do in the future. To manage multiple inboxes you need labels to specify what emails should be in one inbox or another. Let’s start with creating a very simple set of labels (feel free to use the names you’re most comfortable with):

• “To Do” (for the emails which need your response; you can go further and have multiple categories depending on urgency)
• “To Read Later” / “Read Through” (for the ones which you want to read later; it’s important to not use it as a spam category)
• “Waiting” (use it when you’re waiting for a response from someone else; this way you can follow up later in case no one ever responds to you)

You can easily create labels in desktop Gmail by selecting “Manage labels” on the left and then “Create new label” at the bottom of the right screen (screenshot below).

Assuming you created your first three new labels, next you need to go to the next section on your right “Inbox” and there select that you want to use multiple inboxes. Then, you need to select what labels will be associated with each inbox, I used the same names as we have on labels to make it easier but you can name it whatever way you want.

Then it’s better to select the positioning of your inbox to be on the right (I found it to be the most convenient way to organize your folders). And don’t forget to click “Save Changes” at the bottom of this page (for some reason Gmail doesn’t auto-save your changes).

Now, if you go back to your inbox, you should see three empty sections on your right with the appropriate naming you chose for this step. If this is the case — it’s already working, congratulations! You can already use it, just mark your email with one of these labels and it will be displayed in the appropriate section automatically.

Shortcuts

Although we already have multiple “folders” with different purposes in our mail service, it’s still pretty time-consuming to set proper labels for each email (especially if you get dozens of emails every day). Shortcuts can help a lot. To enable shortcuts, go again to “Manage labels”, then select the “General” section and find the “Keyboard shortcuts” item. Then just select it to “on” as shown on the screen below (don’t forget to click “Save Changes” at the bottom):

The most common and useful gmail shortcuts:

• “e” — it archives the currently opened email. If you read an email and it doesn’t require any follow-up/waiting/thorough later reading — you can easily archive it to free your inbox. Just as a reminder, archiving doesn’t delete the email, you’ll still be able to find it through search, it just won’t be displayed in your inbox in line with GTD principles.
• “v” and then select the label — it moved the currently opened email to a specified category. If you open an email and understand that it needs to be thoroughly read later, you can just press “v” and then select “To Read Later” and the email will be moved to an appropriate section (inbox).
• “l” and then select the label — the same as the previous one, but it doesn’t remove the email from the original inbox.
• “j”/”k” — it opens next/previous email.
• “g” — opens your inbox.

There are many more commands, and you can check them out by pressing “Shift+?”, it should open the help pop-up like this:

Filters

Before moving to the complete “Zero Inbox” in GTD style, I’d like to mention filters a little. All the modern mail services have spam protection which works relatively well, but I guess you still get some emails you’re not really interested in (maybe you still want to have them in your client to search in the future, but not really interested to see in your inbox). For instance, some confirmations from your food delivery services, taxi, etc. You can also use filters when you know that some emails should always go to “To Do” or some of your specific predefined categories.

You can easily create any number of filters and specify how emails should be handled by going again to “Manage labels” and then selecting “Filters and Blocked Addresses”. I won’t dive deeper as it should be relatively straightforward how to set it up and depends on your particular use cases.

Zero Inbox

Finally, we got to the most important topic — having Zero Inbox. Zero Inbox means that you usually should have zero emails in your inbox and all things which need your attention should be already categorized. The only possible emails you have in your inbox are new emails and you can quickly apply required labels using shortcuts we discussed earlier to return to the Zero Inbox.

This is the most important aspect of GTD as it helps to organize all the things to do and have a clear understanding of what needs your attention at any given time. We’ve already done all the technical work to set up our gmail to make it possible and only need to follow a number of recommendations to not screw all our efforts.

Whenever you have a new email, you need to do the following actions:

• Ask yourself if this email needs your attention at all, if not — just archive it (press “e”), it won’t remove it completely, but will remove it from the inbox
• If this email needs your response — move it to “To Do” (press “v”)
• If you want to wait for other responses in the email thread — move it to “Waiting”
• If it contains important information which you want to read/analyze later — move it to “To Read Later”

That’s it! These simple steps allow you to handle any new email in seconds. Next, whenever you have time to really work on something, you just open your email client, select “To Do” (which may be further split by urgency) and work on the important business.

It’s also recommended to review your “Waiting” and “To Read Later” lists periodically and remove obsolete items. I usually review them once every 2–4 weeks to ensure that I don’t transform these categories into spam-like entries.

Conclusion

After my note on “How To Organize Your Life”, I got a lot of questions about Gmail and how to make it this clean. I tried to explain all the steps in detail and hope it would help you to make your mail client much more efficient!

As our life becomes busier and busier, you just can’t use inefficient instruments as it will slow you down significantly. Try these recommendations out and let me know what you think!

I may certainly forget to mention something you may already use. Feel free to leave a comment or send a direct message. If it was helpful — clap and follow :)