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Add a much-needed minimalist twist to the Gmail interface, and see how its email efficiency skyrockets on its own. […]
Email is a complex being. When it comes to making an inbox manageable, there are plenty of levels to rethink, from organizational factors at the interface level (hello, tags!) To more advanced background features (filters, anyone? ).
But it also goes beyond the question of its actual inbox interface. It may seem trivial, but having an interface that highlights the features you use most frequently and minimizes unnecessary clutter can make managing email much easier, both in terms of efficiency and simple questions. mental health.
Good news, dear fellow Google users: Gmail has one of the most adaptable inbox interfaces available, and it can do a lot to make it visually appealing and improve productivity. However, by default, the Gmail website is a mess, and it’s up to you to adjust it.
So let’s make a little adjustment, right? Here are eight smart steps you can take to optimize your Gmail inbox interface and make it a more efficient home for all your email driven needs.
1. End the disaster
First off, there’s the virtual mess we’ve just talked about, and God, Gmail has tons of them.
Take, for example, service importance markers. These are the flag symbols to the left of each email in your inbox, which are placed between the star and the sender’s name. In some emails they appear as hollow outlines, while in others they have a golden yellow hue.
Officially, these marks are intended to indicate whether messages may be important to you based on a variety of notices, eg. what emails you open and reply to. For me, however, they are just visual noise, which in no way affects the way I handle messages. They are also redundant when sorting through the Main tab in my Gmail inbox, which is already used to separate important messages from trivial junk. So the only thing these indicators really do is make my inbox more overwhelming and less user friendly.
If you find it so useless, get rid of it by clicking on the settings icon in the upper right corner of Gmail, selecting Settings, then selecting the Inbox tab at the top of the screen. See the “Important Brands” section? Change the setting from “Show marks” to “No marks” and then click the “Save changes” button at the bottom of the screen.
Second, use Google’s online messaging service: What messaging service have you installed next to your Gmail inbox? (It’s complicated)
Simply put, G-Suite users now see Google’s Slack-like chat service (until recently known as Hangouts chat) in the left sidebar of Gmail’s desktop interface, while users who don’t are using the G-Mail Suite, find Hangouts’ original consumer-oriented service (which hasn’t worked for years) in the same place.
And if you don’t regularly use the relevant service that appears in this area for you, your presence is likely to be little more than an unnecessary distraction for you. So get rid of it and enjoy clearing up the clutter even more – just go back to Gmail settings, select the “Chat” tab above, flip the switch to “Chat off” and then click the “Save Changes” button.
Now ask yourself the following: Do you like the way Gmail displays email attachments as separate lines in your inbox under the main content of the related message? If you don’t find this as a useful addition, you can disable these tiles, save space, and give your inbox a more unified look by clicking on the gear icon in the upper right corner of Gmail, selecting “Compactness” and setting Change “Standard” to “Clear” (a nice, medium option) or “Compact” (a super condensed, almost claustrophobic vibration that I wouldn’t recommend to most people).
Last but not least, for this first step, let’s talk about tabs. Assuming you’re using the default tab inbox setting in Gmail, carefully consider which five tabs are on top of your inbox and how much you trust them. Are there any tabs that have little or no significant added value for you? For example, I personally don’t get many emails (that interest me) from social media. That’s why I disabled the Social tab, which gives me one less place where I feel compelled to check, and my inbox becomes even more minimal.
If you have tabs you don’t regularly trust, click this gear-shaped icon again, and this time select “Set up Inbox”. There you can remove the check from all the tabs you no longer want and make them disappear completely from your inbox.
All messages that would have been stored in these logs are simply moved to the closest log that still exists.
Speaking of inbox style: By the way, don’t forget that Gmail now offers five different inbox layouts. If the standard tabbed setup doesn’t seem right, consider one of the alternative options, like an inbox arrangement that organizes your incoming messages into a single list, with unread emails first. I have a separate guide entirely devoted to this topic in case you want to explore the possibilities in detail.
2. Close the drawers when you are not using them.
My wife has a habit of leaving drawers and closet doors open, and I tell you: it drives me crazy. (Hello, darling!) Leaving the virtual drawers open everywhere produces the same effect without causing blows to the head: it creates clutter in the environment and makes it difficult to concentrate the eyes on the really important things.
So take the simplest possible step to improve your Gmail interface and start closing the damn drawers, okay? (Sorry, accumulated frustration from a loosely related area.) There are two drawers worth closing when you’re not using them in Gmail:
The first is the Google service bar on the right side of the screen: the bar with the icons for calendar, storage and tasks. If you’re not using this bar, click the little right arrow in the bottom corner and fold it over to clear the clutter and make room.
Second, the Gmail main menu on the left side of the screen, which can be similarly closed to make the same space available for your main message area. Click the three-line icon at the top of the screen to collapse it, and then simply hover your mouse over the collapsed form to see the full menu.
3. Optimize your tag lists
Gmail labels are great for your organization, but sometimes your organization’s system needs to be tweaked a bit.
After all, Gmail’s tag lists don’t take long to rebel. And the messier these lists are, the harder it is for you to find the labels you really need and use frequently.
Labels appear in two different places in Gmail: in the main menu to the left of your inbox, and then in individual messages each time you use the Label command. These two points can be cleaned and compressed with the same thin tool with very little effort.
Go back to Gmail settings and this time click on the “Tags” heading at the top of the screen. There you will see a list of all the labels you have created, along with all the standard system labels and categories. Next to each tag, you’ll see two columns: “Show in tag list”, which controls whether a tag is shown or hidden at the top of the Gmail main menu, and “Show in message list”, which controls The visibility of a label in the list that appears when you use the Label command in the message.
Think about each tag and category and consider how often you access them from each location. If a tag is not something you routinely click on, hide it. You can still access it by clicking on the word “More” in the Gmail main menu or using the search field in the message list in the message, but it doesn’t take up screen space and pushes the tags to be used regularly, out of sight.
4. Expand your organizational options
If you use Gmail’s star system to tag messages in some way, e.g. When highlighting especially urgent emails or those that deserve a response, you need to be careful – you don’t just have to stick to just one star style.
Gmail has the ability to give you various star options, different colors and styles, which you can reserve for different purposes. For example, in my inbox I use a star type for messages that I have to reply to, another star type for high priority messages that should be processed the same day, and another star type for messages that have a certain type of processing (such as adding an event to my calendar or marking an invoice as paid).
You can add additional stars to your own mix by looking in the General tab of Gmail settings and finding the Stars section in the middle of the page. Drag the designs you want to use from the Not in use row to the In use row, and then place them in the order you want. (Chances are, you want to start with the ones you use most often.)
Be sure to click the “Save Changes” button at the bottom of the screen when you’re done, and then every time you add an asterisk to a message, you can click the asterisk icon to review all available options. They will appear in the same order that you configured them in the Gmail settings. (It’s annoying that this feature doesn’t carry over to Gmail mobile apps, but at least you have it on your desktop.)
5. Eliminate annoying inconveniences
I don’t know about you, but I think the Gmail pushes, the service’s habit of delivering messages with a striking reminder at the beginning of the inbox when Google Djinn decides you’re behind, unbelievably annoying and also quite counterproductive. I have my own systems for managing email, and Gmail’s attempts to figure out what to do and what not to do are more of a hindrance than a help, as they force me to waste time trying to make a mistake. Delete what I have tried before.
If you don’t find these helpful nudges, turn them off by looking for the Automatic Reminders option on the same General tab in Gmail Settings. There you will see two different options that you can disable.
6. Reduce unnecessary clicks
When you scroll through the messages in Gmail, the last thing you want to do is click to go to the next page, and yet by default every 50 messages, Gmail does exactly that.
You can’t completely give up the Gmail paging habit, but you can double the number of messages displayed on the screen. This way, you can view a hundred messages on a single page before clicking to load more. Hey, that’s progress.
The option you need to adjust is at the top of the General tab that we just saw in Gmail Settings. Click the box next to “Number of messages per page” and change it from “50” to “100”, then get ready to rest.
7. Find a design that suits you
Today, the standard Gmail look is pretty white, but you don’t have to stick with this slightly dazzling motif. Click the gear-shaped icon in the upper right corner of the website, choose Themes, and then scroll through the available options.
Two simple options worth considering are Dark, which puts the entire Gmail website in native dark mode, and Soft Gray, which is basically an expanded version of standard pure white. The theme is: just as minimal, but with more contrast, to separate the active news area from the surrounding menus.
If you choose a more graphic option, consider three subtle options, be it one of the many available photos and illustrations or your own uploaded image, to take full advantage of your custom color scheme:
Text Background: The symbol with an “A” in a box at the bottom of the design window. This allows you to change the background color of the actual message area between a light and a dark design.
Bullet: the symbol with an oval in a box. This allows you to darken the outer edges of the image with a simple slider, creating additional contrast and emphasizing your main message area.
Blur: The icon with many small dots in a box. As expected, this allows you to add a level of blur to your image that makes it less noticeable and more of a suitable background.
By combining these three settings, you can create some attractive visual effects that make your inbox as easy on the eyes as possible and as pleasant as possible.
8. Give your inbox a minimalist look
And finally, what could be the most effective change you can make to your Gmail inbox: the icing on the cake for this UI improvement process: Try an extension called Simplify Gmail. It is available for Chrome and Firefox. And, without exaggeration, it is the best of my email experience.
Simplify Gmail is the brainchild of a former Googler who has been a longtime director of design and co-founder of Gmail. It continues where you left Inbox and rearranges Gmail’s core interface to give it a cleaner, simpler, and minimalist look that makes it much easier to use.
The extension does not include trackers, advertisements or cookies, nor does it collect or use personal information in any way. It is even open source if you want to see the code to see it for yourself.
With it and the other interface optimizations we’ve just passed, your Gmail inbox will be a whole new beast, one you can work with more focused and productive than ever. And you know what? The more productive you are with your emails, the less time you will have to spend looking at your inbox.
* Contributing editor JR Raphael serves up delicious treats on the human side of technology at Computerworld.com.
