Gmail and productivity

Since I’m a productivity junkie, I simply have to opti­mize every part of my work. Here are some Gmail set­tings that, as far as I’m con­cerned, help a lot:

  1. I removed the unneeded system labels “Drafts”, “Spam” and “Trash”, since I don’t use them. Settings > Labels > “hide”.
  2. Instead, I use my own labels to cat­e­go­rize mes­sages, for exam­ple “Advertising”, “Wholesalers”, “Résumés”, and labels named after my indi­vid­ual projects. A red label, “Do it!”, stands apart. Coloring the labels sets them apart from the mes­sage sub­jects and makes them stand out clearly “from the crowd”. The very fact that I’ve given a mes­sage a label means it’s more impor­tant than the rest. Add color coding to that: the brighter the label’s color, the more impor­tant the message.
  3. Settings > Labs. I turned on: Navbar drag and drop, Undo Send, Title Tweaks, Search Autocomplete, Inserting images, Google Docs gadget. The names speak for themselves.
  4. Title Tweaks, though, isn’t clear with­out a descrip­tion: it changes the title of the mail page so that it starts with “Inbox” and you can see the number of new mes­sages, even when you’re in another tab.
  5. By the way, I sus­pect many people don’t use search in their mail, though it’s an incred­i­bly handy feature. The search box is above the list of mes­sages, in case anyone hasn’t seen it ;)
  6. Since I keep all my doc­u­ments in Google Docs, it’s handy to put the Docs gadget right under the labels. Very con­ve­nient: it saved me from going from my mail to the Docs page first and only then open­ing the file I need.
  7. Inserting images works in Firefox more simply than you could imag­ine: just drag a pic­ture over from any other open tab. From an enemy web­site, for exam­ple, when you’re writ­ing to a project part­ner about the com­peti­tors’ schemes ;)

I also use the Labs fea­ture “Custom label colors”, because the stan­dard ones are just too ugly. But that’s not pro­duc­tiv­ity any more, that’s senility :)