How To Hack Gmail And Save Hours Every Week

Question of the day—how much time do you spend receiving, reading, and archiving emails that you never actually read.

Every ding on your phone. Every illuminated notification in your gmail window.

Goddammit GMail, you’re ruining my life

I discussed this problem with Steve Kamb from Nerd Fitness (who wrote this awesome guide to productivity), and he gave me some of the best advice I’ve ever implemented for handling email.

It’s this simple—for all of your email that isn’t essential, either unsubscribe, or filter it.

A simple change saved me hundreds of thousands of emails to deal with

I might be exaggerating these numbers a bit

Here is the simple goal, again, but this time with bolding.

For all mail that isn’t essential, either unsubscribe or filter it.

This means, if you don’t need to respond to the email or if it isn’t sent directly to you, it is nonessential. And there is no reason it should clutter up your inbox. So, we are going to filter it with GMail, and hide it from our main inbox. Whenever we feel like it, we can look at our filtered, nonessential email—but at least it won’t bother us daily 🙂

So, check out the video below, where I demonstrate exactly how to do it.

The video will show you exactly how to do it, but here are the four steps in summary. Note: Requires Gmail

How to Filter Your Nonessential Gmail Messages (watch video first, please)

Goal: Every email that is nonessential will be automatically tagged with the Gmail Tag ‘nonessential‘ and filtered out of the inbox.

Method:

It’s easy! Just a simple four step process. We are going to go through all of the emails in your inbox. Every time you see one that isn’t essential (think–an email list, a groupon update, a twitter notification, whatever), we are going to filter the email away. Here is the process

1) Open up a nonessential email in your inbox. Click on it.

2) Click the Message Options arrow

Messages! Options! Arrows!

3) Click ‘Filter Messages Like This’

Shh…don’t tell Crossfit NYC I’m filtering their messages

4) Click on ‘Create Filter With This Search’ and then select two options. First, [x] Skip the Inbox. Second, Apply Label: ‘Nonessential.’ (If it is your first time, you will have to create the label. You’re not dumb. You can do this).

Now, whenever you want to see your nonessential emails, you can click on the nonessential tag in your left column.

 

Select the Nonessential Tag for hours of nonessential fun!

5) Rinse, Repeat. Go through all your emails for the next week, and apply the nonessential tag. Booyah, you’re are now a Hack The System Superstar.

This is the first google image result for ‘Superstar’

That’s it!

You sly fox you, you’ve just saved yourself a ton of time. All new emails will go to the nonessential tab. NICE.

Hey, you. Yes. You. Want to save yourself wasted hours of checking email notifications? Just follow the steps above for 1 week. That’s it. One week.

If you aren’t rich and famous and sexy and able to fly, in just one week, well then I’ve failed.

So try it out. Let me know how it goes in the comments.

Stay productive, you sexy system hacker you.