I was on a meeting last week and the topic of email management came up. Our superintendent has his secretary filter his email for him. A building principal said he has tried using Gmail Labels to make his email more manageable. Having made some comments about my technology collection (conspicuous in my background), it was suggested that I might have an opinion on managing email.

My Device Box Collection

And I do.

I wrote about my particular setup here, at the time using Apple Mail. (I’ve since moved to MailMate, which works the same way as Mail in this regard.) But most people use Gmail in a web browser, and happily, there’s a way to do pretty much exactly the same thing.

I don’t think labels are terribly helpful in Gmail, and the process of labeling or tagging is laborious. Users are likely to give up on them after a while when time grows short and the backlog gets too long. And backlogs really are the trick: the problem with email is that it never stops, and you’re likely to get overwhelmed and give up on it after a while.

The trick is to make it look like there is less to process than is: you make your inbox look smaller. You can use Gmail’s excellent Search Operators to accomplish this bit of self-deception.

My Gmail Inbox, Unfiltered: lots of messages

Here are some examples; type them into Gmail’s search field (replacing “user@gmail.com” with your email address:

to:user@gmail.com label:inbox newer_than:1d

to:user@gmail.com label:inbox newer_than:2d

So what are you filtering here? In the first example, email that came in within the last 24 hours that’s still in your inbox. In the second, anything in your inbox from the last two days. Add days as you need, replacing “newer_than:1d” with 3d, 4d, etc. You’re including your email address, because you’re skipping, for now, any org-wide blasts, distribution lists, and marketing stuff.

Why in your inbox? Because if it’s been archived to All Mail or deleted, you don’t need to see it any more. You already decided what you were going to do with that email.

Do you want to see yesterday’s email, but not today’s? Not a problem:

to:user@gmail.com label:inbox newer_than:2d older_than:1d

Again, you’re using Gmail’s search operators to show you email that came in in the last two days, but adding that you only want those messages to be older than a day. So it’s the last two days’ worth of email, but nothing that came in in the last 24 hours.

It’s not perfect, but what you’re doing is reducing the visual array before your eyes. You can focus on today’s email, and get most of that processed, and then back up to yesterday. And then the day before that. Process as much as a time as you can, without overwhelming yourself.

Gmail filtered: Today’s Messages Only

One quick parting note: Saved searches don’t really work for this, because the filters don’t update themselves after you move or delete an email. That doesn’t sound like a deal breaker, but it is to me.

What’s a solution? Create text snippets and use an application like TextExpander or AutoHotKey to trigger your favorite defaults. I use the former, but anything will do. Mac users and iOS users can even use the build in the system-wide text expansion feature.