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• Slides from Digital Office webinar: Conquer Email Overload - Gmail tips to master your inbox (recorded version Jul 24)

Conquer Email Overload: Gmail tips to master your inbox - webinar transcript. 

This is a recording of a Digital Office webinar on conquering email overload. 

These are Gmail tips to master your email inbox. This webinar is offered by the Enterprise Applications Group within UCD IT Services. The agenda for this session is a little overview about the Digital Office initiative and what it offers, a general description about email overload, and some best practices to reduce this. Then we'll look at more specific Gmail features which can help combat the email overload. And finally, we'll point you to some resources and support. 

So firstly, what is the Digital Office? So the Digital Office is a toolkit of resources from UCD IT Services for UCD staff. And it's all around three themes: collaborating, time management and calendaring, and file storage and sharing. And the goal is to use common tools to achieve common tasks, and in this case, saving time and reducing the volume of emails, as well as being mindful of the university as IT and data security. We have a Digital Office Community which is available and open to all staff. And the link to join that community on Google chat can be found below. We also have a website available at ucd.ie/digital office. And we'd encourage everybody to take a look. 

So as we said, this webinar is about combating email overload and what exactly do we mean by email overload? So I think this graphic illustrates it very nicely, just the volume of emails. So there are over 4 billion active email users worldwide and more than 3 million emails are sent every second. A McKinsey report estimated that 28% of the average work day is spent reading and answering email. And you can see here in this chart that the numbers are only increasing. So the result of all of this is that there is an overwhelming amount of incoming messages in everybody's email inboxes. And the good news is that there are some tools and strategies to manage this volume. So before we look at Gmail specifically, some general best practices to reducing email overload. Some strategies are: follow the two minute rule for quick responses. So if something, you can respond and close out that email within two minutes, just do it. If something will take longer, either delegate it or defer it if it's not urgent. Second, I think following on from this is to set aside dedicated time to check and respond to emails that don't take over your whole day. And lastly, to use clear and concise subject lines and email body text. And this helps afterwards if you're trying to find and retrieve an old email. So that's prioritising email. Some tips to reduce volumes overall. And the first one really is unsubscribe from newsletters and promotional emails. I think we all receive various newsletters, various updates and all of this, sometimes on read and wanted email, it all contributes to the carbon footprint. There is a lot of energy used in storing all of the data. So unsubscribe from those and would also describe, here's some tips, you know, how you can delete mails automatically because sometimes unsubscribe requests aren't always honoured. Our second tip is to limit the use of 'reply all'. So, you know, these threads where everybody's responding, does everybody really need to read your response? Following on from this, there's a Mute feature in Gmail, which can be very useful so that when you've already responded to an email thread, you can mute it so you don't get your inbox pinging every time somebody else updates a group message. And lastly, we remind everyone to set an out of office message when you're away. And Google then, once that's set, will prompt senders that you're out of office before they even send you an email. So again, it might be a way of reducing some of that email volume coming in. 

So those are some general tips, but the majority of our session today is around the features in Gmail that can help to combat email overload. And the good news is we have a few of them. So we'll quickly describe five features, inbox tabs, starring emails, using templates, other features like scheduling send and snoozing, and then archiving, muting, and deleting to get rid of emails. And then we'll do a deeper dial on, dive on filters and labels. So these are great ways to organise and to categorise your email, and labels in Gmail are a bit like folders. So with that, I will provide the slide deck, which will be available to download underneath. But for most of this session, I will go directly into a Gmail inbox here for our EIG training account. 

Okay, so the first thing that I wanted to describe was looking at the email inbox tabs which you can use to organise your emails. So if you click on the little cogwheel settings up on the top of your Gmail here, you'll see some options. So straight away, you can change the density of your mail. So with that default, you can go to comfortable or compact, depending on how you wish to read your email. And then you will see here that there are various options for inbox type. So there are some options like a Priority Inbox, which you can customise. So the important and unread appear at the top. You have starred email and everything else. There are multiple inboxes. And I'm gonna go back to the default here and customize these responses. So as I mentioned, there are ways to have tabs to categorize your emails. And you can see here, we have the default, which is primary on top, promotions, which is marketing, social and political causes, not just promotional emails, and social, which is message from social networks and YouTube videos and the like. So it's a nice way to keep your Primary inbox a little bit cleaner and then be able to categorise these. As you can see here, you can enable or disable any of these tabs simply by clicking. You can also have a tab for Updates and for Forums if you wish. So I'm going to keep the three default and save here. And then you can see that I can go in and so in my inbox, as emails are sent to me, under Promotions would be things that are from, you know, newsletters and the like. And in Social messages, for example, here there's a message from YouTube. So as I said, you can go to your settings and you can change this at any time and you can also go through and customise different options. I think the email display is very personal. So do feel free to update and change this at any time. You can go through and switch it up anytime you like. So that's the first way to, I suppose, organise your emails. So it's set up in the best way for you to see what's important. 

The second tip that we wanted to give was about starring emails. So you'll see that there's a little star message here to the left of any message in your email inbox. And you can star it here to add it to the starred list, which you can then come back to by just hitting star here on the left pane of your Gmail. And it's a way to mark emails that you can come back to later. What you might not be aware of is that you can star items with different icons. So here, if I click once, it's starred with a yellow star. If I click twice, it's an exclamation mark, three times a question mark, four times a green star, and then I can un-star it by clicking again. So again, this is optional. If you want, it's a way to categorize your emails. If you do want to set up these various different icons under the starred menu, you go to your settings again. This time, click 'See all settings'. And this is under the General settings. So if I scroll down, you'll see here there's an option with stars. So one list is ones that are in use and the others are ones that are not in use. So I have four stars in use and you can drag and drop any of these icons. So I might want to get rid of my green star here and I will have a blue star instead. And you can drag and drop so that you can use the icons that are useful to you. So I will click, go down to the bottom and click, save changes, and then I can go up here and star. As I said, the way to select any of those other icons is to click once per yellow star, twice, three times, four times, for whichever ones you've selected. And then if you click again, it's not starred anymore. So this is a very easy way, as we've talked about there, keeping emails and you're deferring them until a later time. So you could star them and you could use different colored stars and to indicate when you need to reply to somebody or which priority they have. It's very handy. 

The next feature that I wanted to talk about in Gmail that can help with the overload is Templates. And templates are very useful if there are messages that you get and you need to send the same or similar responses back to queries all the time. So to enable templates or to use templates, I'm going to hit Compose here. And you can see down at the bottom of the toolbar in the Compose window when you're creating a new email, there are various options down at the bottom. So I'm going to click my three dots here and you'll see I have an option here for templates. So I have some that I created earlier so I can insert one of these templates or I can write an email here and save that as a template, which I'm going to do now. So I will say 'test text for templates for EAG', okay? So again, I'm going to click my three dots here, select templates. There's an arrow here to the right and I'm going to select 'Save draft as template'. So I'm going to select here, 'Save as new template'. I'm going to call it sample templates for webinar and save that. So now if I click my three dots again, you can see that this sample template for webinar is already saved here. If I want, I can overwrite this with something else that I've done before. So I have my other reusable templates that I can add any text to reuse. And this can be very handy, for example, for student queries or anything that you might find that you're sending, you know, similar information. And you can also add in boilerplate text, for example, that you would replace at every time. So it's very useful, very useful. I should mention that in order to use templates, you do need to enable them in your settings. So again, I'll go to my Settings menu here on the top right, which is a little cogwheel. I'll click see all settings. And then this time I will go to the Advanced tab and you'll see that one of the options here is Templates. So this is already enabled here. You can disable it if you don't want to use it, but it's a very useful feature. And once that is switched on, every time I go to the Compose window, I will have my templates option available here. So click the three dots at the bottom right, select templates, and I can either, I can select a template that I've saved before or I can use a draft text as a template. You can also of course delete a template at any time if one of them becomes a bit old or out of date. So a very useful feature. 

As I have the Compose window open, we'll also look at another useful feature. So, you know, we understand that people may be sending emails or maybe working at times outside their usual office hours, depending on people's work schedule, depending on their travel plans. So as well as the Send button here, there's a little dropdown arrow which you can see on the Send button. So once you have your email ready to go, you can schedule that send. So I'll put in my recipient here. The email does need to be ready to go with a recipient title and some text. So I can schedule the send here. So I'll select 'Schedule send'. There are some default ones that I can send tomorrow morning, tomorrow afternoon, or I can go in and I can select a particular date and time. And schedule send. Then you will see that there is a little option here. When I have it done, you can see that this email is scheduled messages and schedule will be sent at their scheduled times, which will be sent at three minutes past five this evening. I actually don't want to receive that email, so I will just delete it here. So that's template and schedule sends. 

So next of all, we can talk about some features that are helpful to get rid of some of the older emails. And with these, we have options to archive, mute, and delete emails. So you can hover over any individual email and you'll see some options over here on the right-hand side. So the first one is archive. If I select this, my email will be sent to an archive. If I select delete, that email will be deleted. I have the option to mark it as unread. And another handy one is to snooze. So as I said, starring is a very useful way to come back to emails that you might want to look at later. If you like as well, you can snooze ones so that they won't come back again into your inbox until a certain time. And again, you can select some of the preset ones or you can select a particular date and time. So looking at these again, okay, I will click the, select this email now, so it's selected. So as I said, there's two options here, archive and delete. So something to be aware of is that when you archive something, it does disappear from your email inbox. You won't see it anymore. But as we mentioned about sustainability and our carbon footprint, mail that is archived, it still counts towards your storage on Google and it can still be retrieved. So you can still search for it and find it. Whereas if something is deleted, it's moved to the trash folder, to the bin here and it's deleted entirely after 30 days. And then that obviously doesn't count towards your Google storage anymore. So we do encourage everybody to go through and to delete items periodically. For example, if there are emails that have very large attachments, very old emails and we'll take a look now at filters and labels, which is ways that you can delete certain categories or do a search and find certain types of emails that you wish to delete. Before we finish with this section about, I suppose, in essence, getting rid of some emails that you don't need anymore, there's another option as well. So as I said, you can go here to the right and do archive or deleting emails. When you select any email and you can select one or more emails as well using the check boxes on the left, you will see that some options appear on the top as well of your email. So one of those options is to archive. You can report things as spam, but you can also delete emails here in a group if there are certain ones that you want to delete and you can also snooze them up here. However, if you click the little three dots here, you get some other options. 

So again, you can star those emails, but something that might be useful is to Mute and that's particularly helpful if you're in a group email or a thread where a lot of people are responding. So you might want to see the overall, but you don't necessarily need to get a ping every time somebody updates the thread. So if you click mute, then those conversations will be muted and you won't get the updates on those conversations. So again, before we go to filters and labels, just to describe again what we did here, we've gone through some organising features pretty quickly. So as the first thing that I said, using the Settings and the Quick Settings here, you can go through and you can customise your inbox display. You can change it and say as well that you can set up a reading pane if you wish. For example here, you can set up a priority inbox. You can have multiple inboxes. And again, you can customise here the suggested emails that are starred, emails that are in draft and your inbox. So you can really set up the display that suits you the best. We also talked about starring emails and that you can do that simply by clicking an email. You can set up different types of stars and icons, and you can simply unclick it then when you've taken whatever action you need to do and you're ready to unstar the emails. We also talked about using email templates. And once those are enabled in your settings, anytime you compose an email and click the three dots at the bottom right, you have the templates option here where you can either select a text that you've saved before or you can write your email and save that draft as a template to use in the future. And lastly, if you wish, you can write your email, set your recipient list and your subject, and you can either send it right away or you can schedule send it if you want it to be delivered at a particular time and date. 

So next of all, we're going to look at categorising, organising our emails. And the way to do that in Gmail is to use filters and labels. So Gmail is set up, I suppose, a little bit differently to Outlook or another email clients. And in that, it has a very powerful search functionality. So it doesn't have folders, but what it does have is labels that are where I've created some labels down here on the left. So labels are quite like folders, except that you can apply more than one label to an email. For example, here I have put the top email here, it's listed under the Digital Office label. And then it's also, I have a label for 'Email that has arrived in the last month'. So you can have more than one label in an email. So it's very easy to create labels. You can actually do it in a few different ways. So you can either go down here and you can click the + icon under labels on the left here. If you want to decide and create a new label, you can call it webinars. And if you wish, you can nest it. So you can have it as like a subfolder of something else. So I'll put this as a 'Webinar' folder and I'll nest it under the 'Digital Office' and I'll create it. So you can see here, I have my Digital Office, I have a couple of subfolders under it. And as you'll see here, you can assign different colours to your labels as well. And the way to do that is to click the three dots and you can then select various different labels here. So I'll select bright green for that one. So again, doing that, you click the three. When you hover over any of the folders or subfolders, there's a little three dots, which brings you up some options, one of which is to color. And there's also a way you can edit, you can remove a label and you can add a sublabel from this menu as well. So you can set these up to whatever set of categories that you want yourself. And something that's useful, as I said, is that you can apply more than one label to an email. 

So how do I apply a label to an email? Well, there are a few different ways to do it. For example, this one here, I can go through and once I select it and have a checkbox on the left, I can go up here and click labels and I can apply any label that I want here. For example, I've got a few already, but I want to apply this to the Webinars folder under the Digital Office. So here you can see that this email as well as being in Digital Office, it's also under Digital Office, the subfolder Webinars and Email in the last month. So yeah, you can use this as folders. You can set up some different ones. For example, I know that some people have a folder or sorry, a label to indicate emails that they're ready to delete and then they delete those emails and bulk together. You can have one for training. You can have labels for whichever categories you want to have yourself. 

So we've looked just there at how you can manually assign a label to an email. But of course there might be sometimes that you want to automatically assign a label or to do an action with various categories of emails. And Gmail, as we said, has a very powerful search and you can create filters in your emails to be able to, so just by, you can either just use the search box to search for something in particular or if you click the icon to the side, it shows you more advanced search options. So you might want to search for emails from, you know, particular recipients. So I want ones that include the words 'YouTube'. So there are various options here. There's from, from to a particular person, a particular subject, you know, wider searches for including the words that someone's going say YouTube or doesn't have. You can select emails that are a greater, that are a size. So for example, you might want to do this to search for emails that have, that are a particular size. You can also select emails that have an attachment, which again, is a good way to do a search for emails that are perhaps, you know, large, taking up a lot of storage. You can also date it. So I want to date once it is within six months of today. So emails that have come within the last six months. And you can search all mail or you can search either particular folders or labels. So I'm going to run this search. So in clues that you can see, there's a lot here from, from YouTube. So again, I can see that, you know, I run the search first to make sure that the search terms and the queries that I've put in are going to bring up the mails that I want. And then once I've, you know, done my search and confirmed that these are the mails I want, I'll click create filter. And you can see here, once you've created a filter, there are a number of things that you can do with it. So if it's a particular set of emails, you can have it skip the inbox and go to archive. You can mark content that has been read already. You can start, you know, any particular set of emails. And something that might be useful is that you can apply a label. So straight away, I can apply a label. I'll choose one here. I might call this, I'll actually put these in the one to delete. You can delete it automatically. And this, as I mentioned earlier, could be helpful. For example, if there's a particular newsletter that you just can't unsubscribe from, you could run a search for either the subject line of the newsletter or the email address that it comes from and then set it to automatically delete so that any emails that then come in from that particular email address will be deleted to skip your inbox entirely. Conversely, if you want to never to go to spam, if you're having issues with receiving particularly important emails. A nice one can be to send a template. So you could run a search for something. If the subject line is, I don't know, student inquiry or, you know, something that comes in often times, you can have it so that automatically, once that email comes in, you can choose one of your templates that you've already created and that that template email will be sent out automatically as a response. 

So I think something to note is that in general, when you've done the search, you always want to apply the filter to matching conversations. So that means that your filter will also include the emails that you've searched for already. If you don't select this, then it will only take the action with emails that come in in the future. So I'm going to create my filter here. And if I look at my label now, test folder to delete, any of my YouTube files should be in there. So that's an example of how you can, first of all, I suppose, create labels and you can manually assign them to emails as they come in. You can move them. You can also just drag and drop them, you know, to assign particular labels to them. Or you can go through using your filters and you can refine your search to find certain categories of emails, certain types of emails. And you can go through then and apply a label to those particular emails. 

As I said, the search is very powerful in Gmail. There are also various search queries that you can use up here to find your searches and I'm going to refer on this. The link to this article from Google can be found below the video. And so there are various search operations that you can do here and one that, for example, you can look for something that are messages that are from a particular label. Messages have a Google Drive, Docs or Sheets attachment. So I'm going to do a search for a label here. So the 'label: is digital office. And then that brings up all of those emails. You could also use the from, say from myself here. So this, again, will bring up all of the emails that are from myself. And then once I do the select all here, either I can apply a label to all of these, I can archive, I can delete, I can report them as spam. So there are a number of things that I can do once I use the search. And I encourage everybody to use the search and to spend some time setting up your filters and labels. 

As I mentioned, the labels are all available down here and you can update them at any time. You can also, again, go into your Gmail settings. So click the cogwheel, click 'See all settings'. And here, first of all, you'll see all of your labels. So the first things that are listed are the System labels. So those ones are there and you can select whether you want to show or hide any of these. But if you scroll down, you can see any labels that you have created and you can create a new label and you can select whether you want to show or hide these labels. There's another tab then that shows the filters and blocked addresses. So then this, again, shows a list of all the filters that you have at the moment and you can edit or delete any of those. So for example, here, I had, I set this one up, this filter that I had, which I set anything that's from the Digital Office and before the 11th of November last year and that has to be marked as red is the action that is to be taken with that one. So it's just another way that you can review the labels and review the filters that you have created. 

So that's filters and labels. You can use the labels to create a new label. You can create it by using the plus here and create it. You can also from any particular email, even this is our autoresponse here, I can go through and I can select my labels and I can either select it that I want to put it in a particular label or I can create a new label at any time as well. So it's very flexible. On the various filtering options, we would encourage you to look at those up here. There are lots of different ways that you can create a filter and search for a particular category of emails. Again, there is a very helpful article from Google which shows you using labels, creating rules to filter your emails, starring, searching, archiving and deleting email. And this very helpful article is linked below the video as well. 

So with that, as I said, these slides are going to be available and each slide has a little video demonstrating the inbox tabs, the stars, templates, schedule send and snoozing emails, archiving, muting and deleting emails. And then as we went through and described in more detail, creating labels to organise your email and also using filters to search and find particular categories of email. 

So with that, just to describe some resources that we have. So I mentioned the Digital Office website and the Digital Office Community already. We have a whole set of articles on the UCD IT Support Hub. So we have how-to instructions and how to do a number of things. And again, that's readily searchable. And there's also a GDPR website available at ucd.ie/GDPR if you have any questions or concerns about confidentiality. There is an introduction to Gmail course on LinkedIn Learning. LinkedIn Learning is available to all UCD staff and students (I need to sign in here). And you can complete that, it's quite short and you get a badge to display on your Gmail profile. As I said, there are links here to the articles with the Gmail search operators, organising and finding email. And there are also some tips when you can't find a particular email. I know that some people have come from using Microsoft Outlook, where the display is a little bit different and Google has some tips in how to switch from Outlook to Gmail that might be helpful. And last but not least, on a more general note, we have an article from Forbes, so it's a third-party article, but there are some suggested strategies if you're really suffering from email fatigue and funding it too much. So with that, that finishes our webinar for today. All resources that were mentioned in the video can be found below and thank you very much for watching.