Mastering Gmail Home Screen Productivity: Essential Features, Tips & Tools -- Labels Calendar More

All right. Hi everybody, Randall F. Dean again, email sanity expert. This is video 3 of the video triplet I'm recording tonight. The other 2 videos were for classic Outlook users and new web Outlook users, and this one's going to be for all the Gmail users that watch the channel. Basically, I'm just going in and showing you what I think are some cool essential tools in the home screens for each of these different versions of email software. So let's pop out, get into Gmail, and get things rolling. All right, so I will pop into my Gmail inbox. Let me move myself down here, and I'll make myself a little smaller too, so I'm not taking up so much screen. And the first thing that I wanted to show you, um, is obviously you've got your folder list over here, and then down here are your labels. And now this is interesting. I actually did a whole video about this. This may confuse you a little bit. Uh, if you have been using tools like Outlook for a number of years, let me show you what I mean. If I click on the little checkbox, notice that I get options up here. Mark unread is one, but this one's moved to, and this is just straight line moving it to a folder. But look, you got these three dots wherever you see three dots in any software, vertical and horizontal. Ellipses, click on them to see what's in here. Because look, I can come in and do label as, and if I do label as, I can put it in a whole bunch of different labels. But look at these labels: Anaphtoma, Anna Dancing School, Automated Messages, Anaphtoma, Anna Dancing School. Wait, your labels are your folders. Your folders are your labels. And listen to this. This is where it gets a little crazy. You can put the same email in multiple labels. You can add multiple labels to the same email. And when you do that, if you then come up and archive the email after you've given it the labels, it will be in all of those folders. Wait, what? One email in multiple places. This is like fourth dimension stuff because it's virtual. Like, they can, they can get away with that. There's no restriction for them doing this. And so that means you can put an email in as many folders as you would like using the labeling and then archive capability. I did a whole video on this. You can go look it up if you want to have a little bit slower speed on the description of that. But I just wanted to show that to you, is that folders and labels and labels are folders. They're basically the same thing in Gmail. I think it's actually one of the coolest things about Gmail. You know, I wish that I could do the same thing really easily in Outlook. In Outlook you can make labels, but they're separate from the folders. So one interesting little thing there. Now notice also you can come and hit this more button and you can go down and see more things that are in here, including things like all mail and trash. You can come in here, manage your labels, create new labels. If you hit less, then you get into your labels more quickly, but you can still go down and hit more down here at the bottom. So you can see probably a lot of the same things that I just showed you up here. The other thing that I wanted to show you is that you have a different set of top bar options depending on whether an email is clicked or not clicked. Primary are just sort of your main emails, but what they've done, at least in my version of Gmail, you now have promotions, social, and updates. This is where a lot of the junk and spam stuff goes into, frankly. They're calling it promotions, but a lot of it's like, you know, just, you know, stuff hitting you from people that you've made purchases from before, signed up with stuff before, trying to keep it a little bit out of your inbox. The social, I've actually, I'm getting stuff about like some of the like investing newsletters and things I've signed up for. For some reason they've gone into here and updates. A lot of times it has to do with things that might be sort of related to things that could possibly end up on my calendar. So, you know, they're doing a little bit of an AI thing with these in terms of how they're sorting these. But typically I don't have to worry about missing stuff I want to see. It shows up into my primary. Now, when I say that, I do think you should periodically, at least every day or two, go check your spam folder just to make sure that somebody trying to send you something that you actually want to see didn't somehow get flipped into your spam folder. So, so that's a good little thing. And like I said, wherever there's three dots, Look at this, mark all as read. That's the only option I have in here. But now watch this. If I click on this, I've got more top header options. Archive means it leaves your inbox. Now remember, if I label it before I hit archive, it will be in, in the Gmail archive and won't show in the inbox, but now it will show in all of those folders. So I recommend labeling before archiving to make it easier to find your stuff later. But, you know, if you remember who the sender was and, you know, maybe something in the subject line, you can search up here and find it, even if it's just in the archive without labels. Here is reporting spam. And please, please, please, if you're getting spam, report it, because Gmail is used by millions of people. And if tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands all receive the same spam message from the same spammer, and we all click the little checkbox and then click the stop sign to report spam, spam, Gmail, Google will learn from that and be able to identify that that sender is a spammer, and it's going to be much more likely it won't make your inbox. It will go right into spam if they don't get blocked by Google. So, you know, good things here. Notice that you can mark unread. I'm not a big fan of that. I would actually recommend you instead turn it into a task or calendar item. And by the way, let me show you this. If I open the email And then I go up to my top bars. Look, I have the options to add it to Google Tasks or add it to the Google Calendar right there. I could even snooze the email so I see it tomorrow. Like I say, I don't, I don't want to deal with this. I can see tomorrow. Not the biggest fan of that. I'd much rather that you go in and look at it and say, what do I need to do? Make it into a task or calendar item, which you can do right there. Notice you can also add labels and filter to look for similar messages, etc. When you're inside an email, slightly different headers versus if if you're on the outside of the email, just with a checkbox. Notice also with the checkbox that when I hover, I'm getting some options way over here to the side. Mark unread, delete, archive. So they're giving lots of little tools here to let you see things. Now notice up here at the top, newer, older. This should make you mad. Mine are grayed out. You know why mine are grayed out? I only have 3 emails in my inbox. So if you've got 500, you can hit that little arrow. But wouldn't it be nice to get it down to just 3? And that's part of the reason I like moving my emails into Tasker calendar if I can't get them done, because then I can go into my task list or calendar to get the work done, and I'm not keeping it all in my inbox. I have a whole class about taming Your Email Beast for both Outlook and Gmail users that you might want to check out if you'd like to get your inbox looking like this. Okay, but I digress. Now let me show you something else that's up here. Here's your search and you can do normal typical search, but notice over here to the side they got this little icon, show search options. And what this is for is to allow you to basically come in and do some filtering. And so you could search by person, you can search by subject line, you can look for emails with certain words. You've got options here. And if let's say I put in, if it's from me, Randy, let's do Randy. There he is, Randy Dean. Now what I can do is I can come down here and search. If I do a search, it'll bring all these up from me. This is my Outlook account that I've sent to my Gmail. But notice that if I instead hit Create Filter, now what it's going to say is, okay, if it's from this Randy Dean guy, and I don't know if you noticed this, but you see what just happened in the background. These are all the emails for that search. So they came in, but now I have options of what I can do with those emails, including automatically archive it, mark it as read, give it a star, apply a label. You can set it up so that whenever that person sends you an email, it will automatically be labeled, forward it, delete it, never send to spam. You know, things like this, always mark important. So you've got some options in here that you can do. And notice it found 43 other emails that matched this filter. You could set it up so that you always mark important and apply it to all of them all at once, or add this label to all 43 all at once. So your filters are actually sort of a pretty cool little tool that allow you to do some automated things with emails beyond just normal search. All right, so I'm going close that. I'm not going to go too deep into that because I wanted to show you one other thing. If I go back to inbox, if I come up here to settings and click on this, you'll get this little panel here called quick settings. This is mostly look and feel kind of things. So like you'll see, I have just the standard default, but look, they got all these pretty little views. I've actually been there. Arches, that's Arches National Park. So if you click on this, Look what it does. It brings the arches into the background. I'm not sure if that's my picture or not. I took a picture very similar to this. The one thing I found, though, with a lot of these backgrounds like this— and that's hard to see. I actually think that's much easier to see if I go back to that, you know. And so I'm a big fan of, you know, make it easy to see. But you can come in and try some different things. They've got a lot of different options, you know, default, which is sort of the standard. Unread first, so that would switch this so that the red ones would be under the unread ones. Um, you know, starred or priority— play around with these. There's some options in here. You can have a reading panel if you like. I typically don't have my reading panel open, but if you want to turn on a reading panel either to the side or to the bottom and get a little preview of your emails, right here is where you can turn that on. And even below that, I think, you know, you can have it to conversation view on or off. Conversation view means you can see all previous messages related to that same email thread based off of that email subject line. Um, so this is sort of basic quick setting stuff, but then you can bypass this. And if you've been using Gmail for more than a couple of years, this is going to look really familiar. Hit see all settings. And now this is the settings that many of us that have been using Gmail for a while this is the screen we're used to. There's a lot of really good tools hiding inside of here. What's interesting is if I come over here to Filters and Blocked Addresses, these are the filters I've set up. And what's wild about it is this is sort of the same tool that I used when I was up here doing this to set up that filter. Now you can go and see where they're at, so you can administer the filters you've created. Um, there's a lot of tools inside of here, uh, I would recommend you come into here. Um, I'll smack you if you put default reply behavior as reply all. Don't do that. Just stop. Um, underneath that, I wanted to show you a couple other things. Look at grammar, spelling, autocorrect. Yeah, why not leave all those on? Um, you know, keep coming down here and there's more capabilities. Look at this one, desktop notifications, important mail on. Now remember in that filter it gave me the option to set that my other email should always be marked important. See what you can do here? That one-two step. You can identify the emails or people that you would like to have automatically marked as important messages and then go into your settings and set it up so that you will only get notifications when it's one of your important people. That way you're not getting distracted by every single thing coming into your inbox, especially if you're getting a pretty heavy flow. So, so some cool stuff. If you keep going further down, what you can see is, you know, you can have your picture set up if it's coming out of your Google profile. You can set up multiple signatures. I have a whole video about how to use that, as well as get all the way down and turn on and off your vacation responder. Responder, respinder. I don't know what a respinder is. Maybe that's, you know, if you need to get a new backbone. Okay, let's move back up here. I will not make any political jokes at all about what I just said. But here's the thing. Look up here at the top. You'll see right next to your settings is Gemini, and you can pop into Gemini. And if you've got the pro account, you can set it up. See, right now they're giving people the opportunity to try this at no cost. Where you can open up emails and do things using Gemini in your emails and other Google Workspace tools, Docs, Sheets, Slides, etc. If you're a heavy, heavy user, might not be bad to give it a try and see if it helps you gain productivity. So, and then right next to the Gemini, notice this, another waffle. Here's a waffle. This is a place that you can go to launch a whole bunch of other Google stuff, including things that are mostly productivity related, like your, you know, Gmail, Contacts, Google Drive, Google Calendar, Google Meet, Docs, Sheets, Slides. But then if you go further down, you'll also see things like Google Keep and, you know, even more stuff. So you can go in here and find— there's Google Tasks down hiding in there. Um, you can get in and find even more stuff. Now I'm going to close that little Gemini tab. I'm going to go back to the inbox because there's one other thing I want to show you before I end this video, which is right over here. You've also got your little button icons for the other 4 major functions that are in your personal planning tools in Google Workspace. Your calendar. And notice when you click on these little function buttons when you're in your inbox, it doesn't go all the way into full calendar mode, it gives you a little peek on the right side for all of these. So if I click Keep, it would open up my Notepad, and if I click on Tasks, it will show me my task list. But here's what's interesting about this. Notice that each one of these has a pop widget at the top, and if I click the pop widget, boom, that opens up full-page task view in Google Tasks. Now if I close this— hold on, I'm I'm going to move my zoom bar out of the way just a little bit. If I close this and I come back into here, I can close Tasks. I can go to Calendar and do the same pop widget, but I want to show you something inside of Calendar that they've added just recently. If I go to the pop widget and open full screen Calendar, I can close Tasks over here to the side because look at this, they've just added a new button when you're in Calendar. You can switch over to Tasks right here. And if you switch to Tasks, you go into that full task manager mode. Pretty cool. The other thing that, that's different— notice the sidebar is a little bit different when you're in Calendar than it was in Inbox. Now that I'm in Calendar, I can see my tasks, I can see my notes, I can see my contacts. But, and this makes some sense when you think about it, Sometimes when you're in your calendar, you want to go see maps to figure out your map to where you're going for that thing on your calendar. They've put maps on the side of calendar instead of the basic other functions. But now something I need you to also see here, which is sort of cool, this little plus, and I believe it's in— let's go check calendar again. I think they got the plus down here too. Yeah, they do. What's the plus? The plus is where you can get add-ons that you can add to your side column from a lot of third-party partners. Now, some of these were designed to work specifically with your Gmail or other Google tools. And so you can pop in here and see if there's anything like— I know a lot of people that use Asana. You could put in an Asana add-on right over here to the side, or Evernote. So this might be a place to go search and see if there's anything really good in here that might allow you to get even better. Now, I bet you a lot of these you have to pay to use them, but might at least be worth looking to see what's hiding in there and see if there's something else you'd like to add over here to the side for easy access while you're working in your Google tools. All right. So that's pretty much a lot of the cool stuff I've seen in Gmail. If you're— if there's something else that I didn't show that you think is really important, please add it into the contacts. And remember, if you're also using Outlook for work, I've got the other two videos, one for classic Outlook users on how to do their screen setup and another one for those using new and/or web Outlook. Why did I do new and web together? They're really close to the same with a couple minor differences, which I point out in that video. So watch for the other two videos. And with that, let's go ahead and shut this one down. I'm going to pop in here, go to my end screen. Make myself way too big. Didn't mean to do that. And let's do this. Let's go to— there we go. Thanks for your time. If you'd like to learn more about me, randy@randalldean.com is my email. You can actually send me an email at that email address to get my productivity PDF tip sheets, including my YouTube channel guide, which has a lot of other tips, not just on Gmail but other Google tools as well as other Microsoft tools. As well as stuff that's not Microsoft or Google at all. I also do have an e-newsletter. You can hit subscribe, just put subscribe in the subject line to that same email address, randy@randalldean.com. I'm doing a little special deal right now where if you subscribe to the e-newsletter, which has no cost and you can unsubscribe anytime, you'll get a free complimentary copy of my ebook on Taming the Email Beast. And of course, you'd like to learn a little bit more about me and what I do, go check out my website, randalldean.com. If you like the video, please like, please subscribe, please share it with friends, please leave me a comment. All these things help the channel get found and, um, well, help me get the word out a little bit more. So hope you enjoyed this video. Thanks for your time.