Hey there do-it-yourself technicians!
Today I want to give you my top 10 tips for getting the most out of Gmail
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Of course, my first tip is: Use Gmail!
You are using Gmail, aren’t you? If you’re not using Gmail let me know why. Pop a comment down below, I’d really love to know.
Google accounts are free for individuals and quite inexpensive for businesses. See the end of this episode for a special promo deal for your business. If you don’t already have a Google account there’s a video here explaining how easy it is to get one and stepping you through the process. If you have got one head to the Google homepage and then click the Gmail link, or just type gmail.com into the address bar.
My second tip for Gmail is to turn keyboard shortcuts on. These are quick little keystroke commands on your keyboard that you can do to make life in
Gmail faster and simpler, but first, you need to turn them on. To do that in Gmail, go up to the “settings cog” near the top right and then click “settings”, then in that general tab scroll down until you see keyboard shortcuts, and click
keyboard shortcuts on, and then click Save Changes right down at the bottom.
If you Google Gmail keyboard shortcuts you’ll get this giant list of them. A few of my favourites are ‘E’ to archive an email, or ‘V’ to save it to a specific label or folder. I also frequently use ‘ctrl-enter’ to send an email when I finish typing it up it’s just faster than picking up my mouse and moving down to hit Send.
Tip 3: snoozing emails. Email is not necessarily the best place to have your to-do lists. But the reality is many of us are sent things that we need to action by email. And sometimes, when you read it is not the time that it needs to be actioned and you don’t want it to get lost in your inbox. To fix that, we have “snooze”!
While you’re viewing the email that you don’t need until later, click the ‘clock
icon’ up in the top menu bar, or press B if you’ve got your keyboard shortcuts on, and it will give you a list of times that you might want to snooze the email
to, or the option to add a custom date and time. The message will then be
removed from your inbox and returned again at the scheduled time.
If you really need it earlier than that you can go to the ‘snooze’ label over on
the side and see everything in there and when it will be returned to your Inbox.
Fourth tip: Inbox View. By default Gmail breaks your email down into primary,
social, and promotional tabs but there are more options if you go to the settings cog, then Settings, and then the inbox tab. You can add the ‘updates’ tab, and the ‘forum’s’ tab from here, or you can choose another view entirely. A lot of people like the priority view, which you can set from the inbox type link above. This sorts your email into important, starred an “other” option, and everything else.
It also gives you an option to hide any of those categories if there are no emails in that category, in your email at the time. This view might suit some people, and it might not work for others but give it a shot, and see how you go.
Tip number five is a smart reply: If we head back to the settings cog, click Settings, and then in ‘general’, scroll down until we see ‘smart replies’ and turn smart reply on, don’t forget to save your changes! when turned on this gives a
series of answers down the bottom of your email premade for you by Google.
They’re usually only one to five sentences (words) but often sum up a really easy answer to an email with a question in it. When you click on them, in this case, I have three options “sure I’d be happy to” “yes I would be interested”, and “I’m not interested”. I just picked the one that suits my personality best, and click on that. It opens a reply to that person, fills that text in and then leaves the cursor there so you can customize it further. It’s just a great shortcut and will save you that little bit of time.
Tip number six: Labels: now Google is a search company first and foremost, so the fact that they encourage us to search for mail using the search bar at the top rather than finding it in a list of folders is not really that surprising, but for some of us, old habits like putting things in folders die hard. For this, Google has labels, Labels are a nested series of tags that we can put on an email to give
it some context. In this case, I’ve selected all of the emails that have come from YouTube then I go up to the top, and Click the label or press the ‘L’ key if you’ve got shortcuts turned on, and type a new label; YouTube. now I can scroll down in this list on the left and find the label YouTube, Click on that and those three messages are the only thing in that list.
Tip number seven is smart compose: This feature like most of the others are in settings, general tab, and there are two options here for smart compose want to turn it on and then another one for personalization. Basically what this does is look at what you’re writing, and see if there’s away that it can finish the sentence for you, a bit like the predictive text on most modern smartphones. I recommend turning both on and then click Save Changes.
Now, when you compose an email Google attempt to finish your sentences for you just like I do for my wife! (😎) I like it when Google does it, how come she doesn’t like it when I do it? Anyway, when the text pops up ahead of you all you have to do is press ‘tab’ like this and it will complete the sentence for you! Here it goes with the second sentence great little time saver, even if it doesn’t work perfectly all the time. If you don’t like what it’s suggesting you can just keep typing as you were to ignore it.
Tip number eight: Undo sending. We all know that feeling of ‘oh really shouldn’t have sent that email’ or ‘oops I press send before I was finished’
well, now Gmail gives you some grace to unsend those messages. By default, it’s set to five seconds. Cog, settings, general and setting the time frame for undoing send make sure you click Save Changes.
Here’s an email I’m sending, and I press send, and there’s the option down the bottom. I click undo send and it pops back up ready to be edited again.
Tip 9: Signature. Google lets you set up a block of text to go at the bottom of each email you send, this is great for adding contact information like phone numbers and social links to every email you send out. Again we head back to the settings cog, click settings in general, we scroll almost all the way to the bottom to find the big box where we can add our signature block. I’ve designed a bit of a fancy signature which I’ll show you how to do in a later video, but for now, put in your information, then scroll down and click Save. Here it is when you click compose for a new message and all of that is there ready for you at the bottom of the message. You can edit it if you want to and we’ve made it to our last tip.
Tip number Ten: unsubscribing. If you’re getting too many emails one option is to unsubscribe from some of those newsletters you don’t read anymore. I’m not talking about my newsletter obviously you read that and if you don’t get it there’s a link to subscribe here. It’s got lots of little tech tips and news in it.
I’m talking about those other subscriptions, you know the ones that I mean the
shopping coupon site you never buy from, the travel information you signed up to for a trip that you’ve now taken, or the newsletter that you signed up to just go into a competition and you’re not really interested in their product anymore. You can unsubscribe from these by clicking on the unsubscribe link right up next to the From email address at the top of most of these emails rather than searching for their custom unsubscribe that may be buried at the bottom somewhere entire little text.
I hope that was useful let me know in the comments below which tip was your favorite. If you have a business and you’re not using Gmail we’ve also got promo codes down in the description below for 20% off your first year of
Gmail.
The Tech Doctor exists to help you become your own technician and navigate your technology maze. There’s some videos here and here that you may not have seen before, or you can click down here to subscribe or up here to subscribe to our mailing list. Thank you so much for watching and have a great day!!!