Hanoi Morillo

I love Gmail. The moment I switched from Hotmail and Yahoo to Gmail, my life changed.
And as a person that works in Google, Gmail is part of my working day.

I’ve been using Priority Inbox for a while now and there are some tips that I’d like to share with you. Feel free to add/share/ask anything in the comments for this post.

Just in case, for those who don’t know what Priority Inbox is, let me explain quickly. Priority Inbox, attempts to automatically identify your important incoming messages and separates them out from everything else.
Your inbox will have the important emails in first place and it’ll show the rest after them.

How?

Gmail uses a variety of signals to prioritize your incoming messages, including who you’ve emailed and chatted with most, which keywords appear frequently in the messages you opened recently, which messages you open or reply to, your stars etc.

However, although in a first attempt, Priority Inbox, is quite accurate you’ll see that sometimes, not important emails appear in your Priority Inbox and viceversa. You need to train a bit your Priority Inbox…

Why is that?

The tool is not perfect… but It can be with a little help.

Rule number 1: Filters and labels
Is your email correctly filtered and labeled?? That’s the first step in general. Not only for the Priority Inbox, but for you life!!!!
Most people don’t use filters and labels correctly but if you’re interested I’m more than happy to write a post about it.
I just want you to keep this idea in mind. Labels are folders and filters are the different dividers within that particular folder. I hope you get the idea.

Rule number 2. Mark as important or not important
When you create/edit a filter you can “Mark always as important” or “Mark as not important”. If you select the first option the emails for that filter will appear in your Priority Inbox.

Two simple steps and your email will be automatically organized for you. You may spend 30 minutes organizing your email but you’ll forget after it.

Rule number 3: Marking individual emails

Another option if you have some emails with no labels is using the importance  arrows to indicate prioritization.

Rule number 4: Archive!!!!

Archiving is not deleting. Archiving means that you’ve read the email (a.k.a your folder is full of papers) and you decide to put it somewhere else (get all those important papers and put them into a cabinet) so you inbox is empty (you can put more new papers in your folder)

If you ever want to read those emails again, you can use the search(ask the colleague seating next to you) or go to “All mail”(check your file cabinet)

Rule number 5: Customizing your Priority Inbox

If you don’t like the way it looks… change it!

By default, Priority Inbox organizes your messages into three main sections:
• Important and unread contains messages that Gmail thinks are important that you haven’t read yet.
• Starred shows messages in your inbox that you’ve starred.
• Everything else shows messages that are in your inbox but are not included in the other two sections.
If you’d like, you can customize these sections. You can choose to show different types of messages in each section, to set maximum sizes for each section, and to hide or add a section altogether. There are two different ways to customize your sections: you can go to Settings, or customize them right from the inline menus.