Don’t let bad email management get in the way of your project management
Yes, you can get all your projects done straight from Gmail! If you use it right…
We have all seen it, you are handling this big project with so many people involved and so many deadlines that your inbox is literally overflowing and as the days go by it’s harder and harder to get your thoughts in order or find any relevant info in the sea of emails.
Whether you are organizing an event, setting up a new advertising campaign or launching a new product, a lot of the decision making and key communication will be done by email.
So you need your inbox to be on its A game and keep track of every suppliers contact, contracts, deadlines, tasks etc.
To do so, you have to be excessively organised and have a tight grip on your contact management, email management and task management. This is sometimes easier said than done so here are my tips to make the most out of Gmail and boost your project management skills.
Make use of the Contact Manager
Integrated straight into Gmail is a contact manager you can use to keep better track of the email addresses of all your suppliers and key people involved with your projects.
You’ll find it on the top left corner of your inbox under Mail>Contact. If you haven’t used it before your index will be empty but you can quickly remedy that by clicking on the Most Contacted tab or the Other Contacts. You can also import contact list to avoid copy pasting from a repertory.
Having your contacts stored in the contact manager will allow you to save time with the autocomplete feature (which means you only need to type in the first letters of an email address to select your contact from a drop down list). You can also create groups of contact which will allow you to only type in the name of the group in the recipient field of your Compose window to automatically email everyone in that group. Using the contact manager will also mean you’ll be able to send out Google calendar invites right from your event’s page.
Use Labels to order your inbox
Labels are one of the easiest and most effective ways of organizing your Gmail inbox. They allow you to categorize emails by topic, client, project, action required etc.
If you’re used to using folders fear not, you can use your labels much like you would a folder to empty out your inbox and get even more precise in your categorization!
In Gmail, conversations can have many labels and be in many locations which offers you more flexibility than having messages in only one folder. A supplier’s quote for your next event could then hold the label “Launch Event” and “Quotes”, so you will be able to find it among all your conversations about the event in your “Launch Event” label/folder to always keep the full picture AND in with every suppliers’ quotes you received for quicker access and an overview of your budget in one place.
You can even use filters to automatically label emails according to their sender, which could help you identify incoming emails in seconds. With Gmelius you can also add labels to emails as you send them out, so you always keep track of the whole conversation.
Take a look at our power user articles for more details on how to use labels and filters.
Add features to your inbox
There are softwares out there which were literally designed to help you better manage your inbox and projects, one of them is Gmelius. With features designed to help you save time and allow you to do more right inside your inbox it can truly become your email management’s secret weapon.
The integrated to-do kanban allows you to keep track of tasks and turn emails into to-do items in one click. It gives you a full Trello-like task management board inside Gmail.
One of the main issues with project management is the amount of emails coming through some urgent, some not so much. It is easy to lose time switching from one to the other and to forget an important but not urgent email in an overflowing inbox.
The snooze feature allows you to temporarily archives emails that you need to be reminded of but aren’t necessarily urgent, and bring them back to the top of your inbox at a time of your choosing.
Another type of email that can easily be forgotten in the rush of project management is the follow-up. Whether you are waiting on a confirmation from a supplier, a signed contract from a venue or to get some feedback from colleagues it’s easy to forget about it until it’s too late. Follow-up reminders bring email conversations back to the top of your inbox if emails you sent are left unanswered for a set period of time.
Sometimes you also need to keep track of a few key info from an email or add some side notes to it to jog your memory. You can do so with Notes. These let you comment email conversations privately without the sender being notified, you can additionally add members of your team to your notes if you want to collaborate behind the scenes.
Once you make use of all of Gmail’s integrated features and add to it Gmelius, your inbox is ready to become the complete communication and project management solution you have always wished it were.
