I’m something of a neat freak (perhaps that’s a function of my Myers-Briggs type?). I like a clean desktop, whether that’s my actual desktop, or the one on my computer. I literally keep nothing on my computer desktop. When I need to launch something, I usually just use Quicksilver.
Perhaps it’s no surprise, then, that I like a clean email inbox, too.
I haven’t yet achieved my goal of Inbox Zero. That’s probably because I’ve yet to fully implement and be faithful to a good system for managing my tasks and projects. There are almost always some emails that need to stay in my inbox, just so I don’t forget about them.
Even with my bad habits, though, I’m generally able to keep my inbox at fewer than ten messages; on good days, it’s fewer than five (right now I’m at two–hurrah!).
I’ve found that one of the easiest ways to keep my inbox under control is to keep a lot of messages from reaching my inbox in the first place. Like many other people, I get an awful lot of email that just isn’t all that important. Some friends have email lists to which they send just about every interesting thing they come across on the web. There are announcements from our institution’s media relations department about coverage of the institution in the local media. There are messages that go out that are intended primarily for students, but that may be of interest to faculty.
None of these are the kind of emails that I want to lose, but they don’t need to go to my inbox. They’re the kind of thing that I can look at when I’m not pressed for time.
What these kinds of emails have in common is that they’re ordinarily sent by the same people. That makes them great candidates for using GMail’s filters.
Setting up a filter is easy. At the top of your GMail window, you’ll see a link that says “Create a filter.”
Clicking on that link brings you 
to a window that lets you fill in the characteristic(s) of the messages you want to filter. I normally just fill in the appropriate email address, but there are several other options that you might choose instead of or in addition to the email address. When everything’s filled in to your satisfaction, click on “Next step.”
That takes you to the final screen in the setup process, where you can tell GMail what you’d like to do with messages that match your criteria. Since I’m trying to keep my inbox clear, I tell GMail to skip the inbox and archive the messages. To make them easy to find again when I have more time, I also usually have the filter mark messages with a label. If you like, you can ask GMail to apply the filter to already-received messages that meet the criteria you set.
I’m still left with a lot of email messages that require my time and attention, but using filters cuts the clutter in my inbox considerably.
To get the rest of the way to Inbox Zero, I guess I’ll just have to become more diligent at managing tasks and projects.
Do you have additional suggestions for managing the inbox, whether in GMail or in other mail systems? Let’s hear about them in the comments.
The photo in this post is CC-licensed by Flickr user Jose C Silva.
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4 Responses to All Things Google: Using Filters to Manage Your Inbox
Amy Cavender - February 16, 2010 at 9:01 am
What great ideas from everyone. The tip about using filters for classes might prove especially useful to me, and it’s one I hadn’t thought of. Students might or might not remember to use a keyword in a subject line, but if I just give them a specific email address for the course, that makes organizing easy enough.
I wonder if that will work with Google Documents–if students share a document with a course-specific address, will the item show up in my regular GDocs account? I would think so, but I’ll have to experiment.
William Patrick Wend - February 13, 2010 at 7:11 pm
I use filters for grading papers. Students submit their papers to a Gmail (we have had tons of problems on campus with the email system, so this semester I’m not even telling them my campus email) account. I then break the papers down into days (I normally grade five papers per day). Using “multiple inboxes” from the Google Labs, I display each tag on the right side of my inbox.
Adam Turner - February 12, 2010 at 3:57 pm
Very nice overview of the filter feature. This handy little tool is also useful for automatically organizing multiple email accounts using a single gmail account. You can create filters for mail coming from each address and automatically label it. Add on top of it the multiple inbox lab and it becomes even easier to shuffle email into neat boxes. The additional inboxes essentially show gmail search results; something like intermediate archiving. For example, I have one inbox that holds emails that are waiting for an answer. These messages are archived out of my main inbox, but a label (in this case an ellipses) keeps them in my “waiting for reply” box so that I don’t forget about them. Remove the label, and away they go.
Evan Johnston - February 16, 2010 at 4:44 am
Another use for Gmail filters: Tell your students to include a specific tag in the subject line for each class (or even assignment), and set up a filter based on that criterion. Or, better yet, use Gmail’s “unlimited addresses” feature to give your students distinct addresses for each class or assignment, and filter by those. All you have to do is insert a plus sign followed by whatever tag you want before the @ symbol in your normal address: Messages sent to john.doe+bio101@gmail.com are delivered to john.doe@gmail.com, but can still be filtered by the bio101 tag just like messages sent to completely different addresses, as Adam mentions above. You don’t have to do any special set up, and as the name implies your only limit is what people are willing to type into a “To:” field.