Something New in Gmail! Good or Bad? Sound Notifications in Your Settings -- New Microlearning Video

All right, hi everybody, Randall F. Dean here, email sanity expert. Hey, um, this one, it's time for some more microlearning, and this is either going to be a really cool tool for you or something that could drive you a little bit crazy, uh, and I'll show you why in just a minute. I, I noticed this while I was actually doing a live client program on Taming the Email Beast for one of my clients yesterday. And as I was showing them some stuff in the settings, Gmail went, hey, wait a minute, that's new. So let me show you what's new. Let's pop out of here. Let's go into my Gmail. All right, and, uh, remember the pathway to get the full settings in Gmail is to click on the little settings tool and then bypass quick settings by clicking on see all settings. And that'll bring up the old settings, uh, forward header bar that you probably remember from a couple, 3 years ago before they added that Quick Settings little tool there. And this one is straight up under the General Settings tab, just page down to Desktop Notifications. And this is what's new. Take a look at this. Uh, Mail Notification— you can now get sounds when you receive your emails. See why that one might not be good? But can I show you how I think it actually could be very helpful? First, let's turn one on. Let's try Nudge. Do do do. That's the sound it just made. And now what I want to do is page to the bottom and hit Save Changes, so that way it becomes a change in my settings. And now the next thing that I want to do is this. I want to now show you how maybe you can have this be helpful. And here's what I want you to think about doing. This is one of the tips I share in my taming email programs, um, specifically when we're talking about Gmail, you can go up in your settings also and go to See All Settings, and you can go into your filters. And inside your filters, notice this, I've already set up a couple of these. Do this, mark as important. Do this, mark as important. You can hit Create a New Filter, and when you create a new filter, you can tell Gmail which emails are most important by who sent it to you or what was in the subject line or maybe has the words. So like if it's from one of your key clients, you could have their domain name right there. Uh, so let me do an example. Here's me, randy@randalldean.com, and I'm going to hit Create Filter. And then let me show you what I can do. I have a couple options. One, if I was spamming myself, I could just delete it. But two, right here, this is the one, Always Mark It Important. Now watch this, I'm going to hit Create Filter, and now you'll see if it's from me to me, it's going to be important. Let's go back to the General tab, and I want you to look at this one more time. If we come back down to Desktop Notifications, take a look. Notice that I don't have it on New Mail, which would be everything coming in all the time. That's the one that'll drive you crazy. No, I've only got it set up for important mail. So now I should get both a pop-up and the new little sound nudge. So maybe that can actually be helpful, not completely and totally annoying. I guess that's up to you. So give it a try, something new. Uh, let's finish this one up. Uh, once again, I am Randy Dean, the Email Sanity Expert. I'd like to thank you all for your time today. If you'd like to learn a little bit more about me and my programs, go check out my website. Brand new website, just got launched about a week or so ago. Uh, same address, but we've done a complete top to bottom redo. So go check out my site, randalldean.com. Um, if you like the video, please give it a like, please subscribe, leave me a comment. And if you want to get my productivity tip sheets on time management, email management, Outlook usage, 365 usage, gmail and Google Workspace usage, smartphones, tablets, etc., send me an email randy@randalldean.com, put YouTube PDF in the subject line, and I'll give you a whole bunch of self-study tools. Thanks everybody, bye now.