7 Tips For Working With Gmail From A Former Google Employee

2024 Author: Malcolm Clapton | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 03:44

If hundreds of incoming emails and constant distractions for checking your mail do not allow you to focus on your main activity, then this article is for you. Rudolphe Dutel, a former Google employee, explained how to work with Gmail correctly without a headache.

In 2011, Rudolf Dutel took a job at Google. “My first day at the Google office was like Harry Potter’s arrival at Hogwarts: you’re very worried, like a schoolboy on a first date, and it’s not clear what to do,” Rudolph recalls. "Therefore, I was glad to any job entrusted to me and the opportunity to learn something new in the process."

The next two years he was destined to closely engage in training company employees to work with the mail service Gmail, as well as its corporate sales.

Dütel is no longer a Google member; he is now an employee of Buffer and the founder of the Remotive project, an electronic weekly magazine for remote workers. However, he still uses some of the tricks that he taught his former colleagues.

How to Train Your Email: 7 Killer Tips for Working with Gmail

Sometimes opening your Inbox on Monday morning is a revelation. It seems that it is physically impossible to sort out the endless stream of letters.

E-mail today is not used except in remote villages, where there is no electricity or cell towers. According to research from the McKinsey Global Institute, we spend an average of a third of our workday answering emails.

The average skilled worker spends up to 28% of their useful time parsing email. This is approximately 13 hours a week.

Of course, I don't want to agree with such sad statistics. Moreover, everyone wants to spend their time on something more useful. To this end, Dutel spent a lot of time testing the capabilities of Gmail, utilities and services, highlighting the seven most useful, in his opinion, for daily use. Perhaps working correspondence is not such a long business.

1. Use the "Cancel sending" button

Have you ever noticed a few annoying typos in your letter after clicking "Send"? I'm sure yes.

From now on, there is nothing more to be afraid of: you have the function of canceling sending, using which is a strict prerequisite for those who decided to seriously take up the management of precious working time.

You can activate the function by going to the menu and putting a tick in front of the corresponding function: "Settings" → "General" → "Cancel sending". Optionally, the cancellation period can be set to 10, 20 or 30 seconds.

Try it yourself, I personally liked it!

2. Apply templates to save time

We write a huge number of letters of the same type, similar to each other like two drops of water. Sometimes we take as the basis for new letters those that we have already written to other people. For example, for salespeople, this is convenient and can significantly save time.

So why not prepare a few templates for this kind of message instead of rewriting the same thing over and over again? After all, replacing a couple of words and phrases is much easier than writing anew. The main thing is not to forget to reread it later.

Prepare and save some template responses that you can use later if needed.

To enable the "Response Templates" function, go to the "Lab" tab in the settings menu.

Thanks to this incredibly useful feature, Rudolph and his brother managed to manually send their contact details to the first 1,500 Remotive subscribers in a standard mailing letter.

3. Use the offline access function

Another trick we learned from Dutel is how to continue working with Gmail without having access to the Internet.

Perhaps some of you like to disconnect from others for a while in order to fully devote yourself to creative tasks. However, in most cases, you simply cannot do without the "Inbox" folder, where you, for example, have dropped the technical task. How to be?

For all train travel, paid or limited Wi-Fi access and other unforeseen circumstances, you can use the Offline function. It allows you to read, reply, search and archive emails without Internet access.

This is really very convenient, since this mode allows you to work not only with mail, but also with Google Drive and Google Docs.

4. Do not have time? Pause

At times, incoming messages just fall into the box one after another, annoying and distracting from the work on which we are focused. One, two, four, ten new letters … What if there is something important?

The best solution to this problem, according to Dutel, was the Inbox Pause function. The meaning of this function is very simple: you suspend the flow of incoming correspondence if you are busy with something important, and when you are freed from the burden of worries and a calendar full of events, you return to them as if you received them at the same second by going to the page with mail tab.

5. Unsubscribe from unnecessary mailing lists

It just so happens that it is difficult to completely get rid of all kinds of mailings getting into your work email inbox. How do you get rid of those that are not at all interesting to you?

Check out Unroll.me, a utility that can help you organize your emails in the best possible way in minutes. Once you sign up for the service, open the mailing list you subscribe to. Then unsubscribe from unnecessary ones.

6. Turn on 2-Step Verification

It seems that Gmail knows almost everything about us: with whom we communicate, what pictures we look for in the search, what we store in the "Documents". We can say that this is a kind of flight control center and the main command headquarters - all links lead here, like the roads to Rome. This means that safety should be taken care of first.

Two-Step Verification is the best solution for this task. "Two-", because to protect your information, you will need not only your password for the mailbox, but also a unique code that you will receive every time you try to access your mailbox from a mobile application or SMS-message.

Rudolph also advises paying attention to the 1Password service.

Many other popular services like Dropbox, Facebook, and Twitter also use 2-Step Verification for access.

By the way, for the safety of your data, it is important to ensure that your Gmail account is not used on several devices at once, for example, on two computers at the same time.

7. Use more informative notifications

Many messengers use several statuses for messages at once: "Sent", "Delivered", "Read". In some places, such as Facebook, icons are used to represent these notifications.

For the Gmail service, there is a similar solution - Sidekick. This is a good application for those who are looking for a job, or those whose activities are related to sales: it is very convenient to get the statuses of your sent emails.

Now you know a little more about the safety and time savings when working with Gmail. We hope the advice of a seasoned specialist will help you become more productive.