The Top 2 Gmail Features You Should Be Using To Increase Your Productivity

Millions of people use Gmail as their preferred email tool.

However, most are not aware of the many features that Gmail has to help them increase their productivity.

Two of these features are filters and labels. Let's explore these features to reduce the time you spend checking mail and make you more productive. Gmail Filters is like having a virtual assistant sorting your email for you.

Based on rules you specify, an email is automatically labeled, archived, marked as read, starred, forwarded, deleted, and/or marked as important. Let's say that you want email from your boss to automatically be marked as important and labeled under your "Work" folder. To do this, place a check on any email from your boss, click on the "More actions" drop down menu and select "Filter Messages Like These".
On the next screen fill in the criteria that you want Gmail to base its selection on.
Click next, and then you check the boxes for "Apply the Label:Work" and "Always Mark As Important".
Next, click on "Create Filter" and you're done.

Next time an email comes from your boss, it will automatically be labeled and marked as important.
You can do this for all your email and it will save you lots of time when it comes to applying labels, removing emails from the inbox, marking things as important or not and archiving. This brings us to the next feature which is Labels. You can create labels to assign categories to your email and color code them to help organize all your mail.
So when you get an email from your son for instance, you can label it under "Family" for example.
Now pay attention, because this is where things get fun.
When combined with filters, labels become even more effective.
Here's an extremely useful example on how to do this.
I created a Label called "Newsletters" for subscriptions that I want to have, but that aren't crucial for me to see immediately.
Once that Label was created I selected all the newsletter subscriptions I had and created a filter that would automatically place them in the "Newsletter" folder and skip the Inbox.
This reduced the clutter in my Inbox tremendously.

Now I only see the most important mail in my Inbox and once a week or so I'll check the "Newsletter" folder when it's convenient for me! And you can do this for any Label you want. Here's how to access the Labels and Filters settings.

Click on the Settings link in the upper right hand corner of you Gmail interface once you are logged in.
Among all the other tabs you will see the Labels and Filters tabs.
You can then customize the options or make any changes.
Now that you know how to use these two features, you will approach your Inbox in a whole new way.

Put this to use and you will reduce the time you spend checking and responding to email and be more productive.