‘Inbox by Gmail’ is the ultimate life hack

Inbox by Gmail is Google’s idea of the future of email, and we also believe it’s much more than that.

Published in

Boxy Team Blog

9 min readNov 4, 2016

As the creators of Boxy, the best unofficial Mac client for Inbox by Gmail, we believe ‘Inbox by Gmail’ is not just another email platform, but really an amazing tool that makes us more productive and relaxed. We have our theories on why, but Benjamin Brandall, a writer at Process Street, agreed to write this terrific piece for us which makes great points on why Inbox is the ultimate life hack.

Thanks to Benjamin for the terrific article. 👏 Enjoy!

— Fabrizio & Francesco

While writing an article for TechCrunch about empty states in app design, I came across Inbox by Gmail — the app which rewards you with a sunny sky when you hit inbox zero.

I’m probably a little late to the party, and as much as I love Gmail I feel that Inbox is a smarter and more intuitive way to process a bulging inbox.

Vinay Patankar covered why task snoozing is so powerful, which made me want to try an app with the same mechanics.

“Snoozing has been the most effective way I have found to manage both tasks and emails. It helps me action things faster and reduces the overall number of decisions I need to make each day.”

If you’re anything like me and have some or all of these traits, you’re probably going to get a lot out of Inbox by Gmail:

Very few of your emails warrant a reply;
Not even half of your emails actually get opened;
You often forget to create tasks in your to-do lists;
You rarely get to Inbox Zero;
You find it hard to separate useful emails from trash;
You need reminding often before you start working on a task;
You struggle to keep all your communication and tasks organized;
You like good things.

So the questions is: why is Inbox better than Gmail? How does it compare to other clients and platforms? How does it make email much more effective while giving users more tools AND peace of mind?

Here’s The Showdown.

You can pin the most important emails to the top of your inbox

Let’s start with a very simple, yet fundamental feature. In a similar way to how Gmail has stars, Inbox has pins. In my opinion, pins are more useful. While you could filter Gmail to show only starred items, that’s more friction than I’d like, and, unlike Inbox, starring doesn’t actually… do anything else.

A pinned email sits at the top of your inbox and looms over you, preventing you from reaching the blue sky until you do something about it. If you need something to be at the top of your list before you ever get round to it, you’ll be a lot more productive with pins than stars.

It’s not just that, either. Pins become exceptionally useful when you get round to batch archiving, since pinned items stay in your inbox even if you archive/delete the bundle they’re in.

✨ Pro tip by the Boxy team: search for is:pinned to see all your pinned items at once.

You can batch-archive emails in one click

While I was still a Gmail user, I was always looking for ways to quickly process all of my unimportant emails — you know, things like notifications you’ve already read or offers you’re only occasionally interested in.

In Gmail, I tried ‘select all, unselect a few, archive all, next page, repeat’. I tried furiously bashing keyboard shortcuts, hammering through my inbox like it was a fearsome beast to be destroyed.

In Inbox, you can click the tick icon above each group to sweep all unpinned items.

Batch-archiving messages in Boxy for Mac.

Whoosh.

Snooze important, non-urgent items to bounce back later

Just like many todo apps have a task snoozing feature, Inbox has the same feature for emails, something made popular by the dear departed Mailbox and that you can now find in almost every major email client.

You can snooze an email ’til later today, this evening, tomorrow, next week, next weekend, or pick a custom time or place. Snoozing essentially moves it to a “Snoozed” tab, away from your inbox, then bounces it back over whenever you want to deal with it.

I’ve found that putting off tasks until later has made me more productive. That’s because I’ve at least ‘touched’ them. Leaving them as unread and letting them slip further down was something I was prone to do with Gmail, even for exceptionally important things.

This feature also comes handy in many situations where you need to take action on something, but not now. For instance, you get a welcome email of a subscribtion service but you have to remember to cancel it when the free trial ends? Just snooze the email until a couple of days before that deadline.

While snoozing can be a good way to get a quick reminder, there’s a way with Inbox that you can create to-do list items from your emails.

Create one-click Reminders from inside your inbox

Inbox is pretty smart. It parses your received emails for action items — things like ‘send me the images’ or ‘call my assistant’ — and offers you to add them as reminders.

If you often check your inbox like me, you’re going to find those reminders very useful. In fact, while you have to remember to open your todo app of choice, you’re going to check your inbox anyway and you won’t miss those todos if you put them there.

Beside adding Reminders to emails, you can easily create standalone Reminders that works like items in the average todo app. You can even set a Reminder to repeat automatically, just like you would do in Calendar or todo app.

You can save time with Smart Reply

One of the most interesting Inbox features Google announced came in the form of facilitation for slothfully lazy individuals like myself.

When Inbox thinks that you’d be fine to fire off a canned response, it shows you three options underneath when you open the email. This is yet another way of reducing cognitive overload and making things easier and faster.

I can only speak for myself, but this really helps me get around to answering emails I’d probably not reply to otherwise.

You can process your inbox at lightning speed, even on mobile

Here’s a demonstration of what happens when you swipe an email left or right on Gmail vs Inbox. On Gmail, swiping right brings up the option to archive it, and left gives you the hidden menu.

Inbox’s reaction feels far more natural to me. Swiping right archives the email, and swiping left snoozes it. You can also swipe to delete if you change a simple setting in your Inbox.

Also, while some features tend to appear on mobile first, both the iOS/Android apps and the desktop webapp (and therefore the Mac client Boxy) eventually get all the updates. It’s a perfect echosystem.

For the pro users: you can still keep using the Gmail/Zapier integration

Since Inbox works as an interface for Gmail, you can keep on using your Zapier integrations. Here are some examples:

✨ Pro tip by the Boxy team: you can use the Zapier Parser to process all kinds of emails and use the extracted data in many ways. For instance, we get AppFigures reports on Boxy’s sales via email, and we process those emails with the Parser to turn them into Slack messages, since that’s where we want to get the reports.

Lots of other handy features, from Trips and Highlights to Saved Links and Templates

Do not underestimate these features, especially since they’re still unique to Inbox and its client Boxy, like having your email client gather and parse trips related emails from airlines, train companies and hotel reservations into organized Trips bundles.

Other features can prove to really make the difference in choosing Inbox over other competing apps and platforms. Saving links to Inbox, for instance, makes your email client become also your reading list.

It’s also worth noting that features like Templates clearly show how the Inbox team is also working with advanced users on mind.

There are a few reasons why Inbox might not be perfect for you…

While writing this article, I realized that there are probably a lot of people who are already deeply ingrained in their Gmail workflow that would have a hard time making the switch. Here are some problems with Inbox that might hold you back:

It’s a bit harder to make Inbox work with non-Gmail addresses
You hate the sun and sky
You hate good things

If I’ve convinced you to make the switch, you can download the Inbox by Gmail app for Android or iOS, you can visit inbox.google.com or…

Use Boxy, a desktop client for Inbox

Why use a desktop client when there are web versions? The main reason for me, is that I don’t want to have my emails open all the time but I want a quick way to check my inbox that doesn’t need to leave an open tab in my browser.

That’s lazy. Yeah, it definitely is. But it doesn’t mean that wasting time getting distracted on your inbox every time you’re tabbing through your browser is productive one bit.

Basically, Boxy does everything that the web version of Inbox by Gmail does, which is awesome, plus some neat features like Themes, Reader Mode, Markdown support and more coming in Boxy 2 (free update coming in December). Really, what do you prefer? Opening up your browser to check your emails or being able to check them in one click from the dock (or, being able to hide the app away to remove temptation).

For me, it acts like an iOS app with badge notifications and means that I don’t have to use Chrome or Safari as a gateway. Now, I’m all for web apps. But for the ones that I use for more than a third of my job functions — and Inbox is one of them — I’d rather keep it out of the disposable, tabbed world of Gmail.

Unlike Inbox’s web app, Boxy isn’t free. It’ll cost you $5.99 USD from the App Store, and I feel like I get more out of it than it cost me.

If you’re an Inbox user on macOS, I’d highly recommend keeping your emails separate from the rest of the web. Because the free alternatives like Mail, Outlook or whatever, simply aren’t Inbox.

Yesterday I found out that the average person checks their emails 77 times per day. Seriously? Is that what people do?

Back in the 90s, computers used to gleefully announce that ‘you’ve got mail’, but now clearing your inbox is cause for celebration.

It’s been said email is evil, a demon, a destructive force or whatever, but actually it’s just ancient.

Email can suck, but you just need a system to handle it and everything will be just fine. Inbox by Gmail is one fantastic tool that doesn’t just help you to achieve that goal, but it makes you do much more than that, from keeping track of things to do (and read, watch…) to organizing your trips, and Boxy is the best way to use it on your Mac.

Thanks so much for reading.