Keeping Your Inbox Empty with Gmail – Part 1

During my time at Google I have instructed more than 450 Googlers with best practices on how to keep your inbox empty while using Gmail. Especially in a company like Google, the possibility of information overload is something to keep in mind, be aware of and hopefully avoid. I will hereby, in a couple of articles on this website, share some of my experiences and teachings. In this article I will first discuss a few of the basic principles behind Gmail. In following articles I will discuss more in depth the best practices on how to keep that inbox empty.

One important note before we start: Everything you know, and may have experienced in other email programs or solutions, you need to forget for a moment!

Why so much focus on an empty inbox while using Gmail?

First of all, an empty inbox will save you time, give you overview of what you need to do and what is urgent (and more importantly, what is not urgent). Beyond that, it will most definitely give you a good feeling and a sense of completion!

Secondly, we at Google (and me personally) like to dogfood our own products, meaning we will use the same products as our users and experience the pain points they may experience. This allows us to improve and make an even better product. Lastly I believe that Gmail is a fantastic product that can really help you be more productive, as Gmail is designed to keep things simple. I hope that the following basic principles will illustrate this point.

Inbox as a folder does not exist!

So to start off, there are no folders in Gmail. Okay, there is one folder called All Mail . Now here comes the key point: In Gmail, the inbox is a label, it does not exist as a folder! The inbox is not physical place where files or emails are stored. All emails in Gmail are stored in the All Mail folder and everything else is basically a label.  Whenever you receive a new email in your inbox you are actually receiving this email in your All Mail folder and it was labeled as inbox. When you log into Gmail, by default you will load the inbox view and as such you see new incoming mail.

If this sounds confusing, please read the lines above again as this will help you better understand how Gmail works and why it is so powerful.

No tree structure of folders?

I often get the question ‘can I also create labels under other labels?’ And the answer to this is: No, and why would you want too? When you think of labels, think of these to be similar to post-it notes, you can apply as many as you like to an email or none at all. If this is still too confusing, try to think of labels as references, shortcuts or bookmarks. Knowing this, would you still want to apply post-it notes under other post-it (in a hierarchy/tree structure)? It is important to leave the idea of folders behind and experiment with labels.

How about Archiving in Gmail?

Yes, it is true that when you are in the inbox (or in another label view) you can hit a button or keyboard shortcut to archive emails. When you do this, you are basically only removing the label. So another word for archiving in Gmail is ‘unlabeling’ or ‘removing the label’. So keep in mind that by archiving an email from your inbox, you do not move the email, nor do you store it in any special way. You just (and only) remove the label inbox from that email.

Now that you understand that all emails are stored in the All Mail folder (and not in inbox) I hope you can see you do not need to be afraid of archiving your emails and, by doing so, to empty your inbox.

Conversations rule!

Instead of finding all the different replies on one particular email topic you have been discussing, Gmail introduced in 2004 a concept called conversations. In many ways (for the regular user) these can be compared to threads in forums, where one person replies to another and you see it all appear underneath each other (all replies grouped by topic). As a result, you always know what has been said before, what you have read and what the conversation is about within the same email view. Over time I have found that this is saving me a lot of time, as well as making my responses shorter and quicker. However  I am amazed that, after more than 5 years, none of the other major web mail services have copied the idea of conversations. You would think it should not be too hard to implement or at least experiment with. Anyway, moving on …

Find Emails by using Search!

The main functionality in Gmail is search. Search will become your new best friend in Gmail! Mainly because Gmail stores all your email in one folder and not everything has to be labeled, you use the search function to find that one email back again. Even when you click on a label, you are actually doing a search in Gmail (e.g. look at the search field after you click on a label). When you use search, it is good to know that there are a number of advanced search operators you can use to limit the results of your searches. I find myself often using two to three search operators to search through more than 50.000 of my emails. You can even save some of your frequently used searches using Gmail Labs (look for the ‘Quick Links‘ Labs item).

That is it for now. In a next article I will discuss some of the techniques you can use to keep your inbox empty.