Using Gmail Labels, Nested Labels And Message Sneak Peaks To Increase Productivity

Do you receive a lot of email every single day and find it very difficult to organize email messages in your Gmail inbox? Do you forget or lose already received emails from friends and clients and repeatedly search older emails in your archives folder?

A lot of people still don’t get the idea of using labels in Gmail and how nested labels can help them organize their inbox and automatically categorize incoming messages from specific people. Some typical habits I have observed among friends are as follows:

1. They never hit the “Archive” or “Delete” button. All the old emails lay in the inbox which is really not a very convenient way to keep your old messages sorted.

2. They never use custom labels to categorize messages from specific people into custom folders. Most of my friends do not even know what a “Label” is and how labels and nested labels work.

3. When they want to find old emails in Gmail, they start reading from the first message, which is insanely time consuming. If you’re looking for a message that was sent by Harry, what do you think the search box is provided for ?

In this short tutorial, I will show you how to create labels and nested labels in Gmail and automatically categorize email messages from specific people. When you have created the habit of using Labels and custom filters, you will save a lot of time sorting and reading through old email messages that need attention.

How to Create Labels In Gmail

There are two ways to create Labels – either go to Gmail settings and manually create labels or folders of your choice. Or you can create labels on demand, while reading messages in your inbox, this one is much easy for most users.

1. While reading a message, click on “Labels” and select the option “Create a new label” as shown below:

2. This will open a small browser overlay pop up box where you can enter a name of the label. It’s advised to keep the label name short and meaningfull, so that you can quickly understand what type of messages are stored in this label. Some example of good label names may be “School friends”, “Work”, “newsletters” and so on.

3. If you want to create nested labels, select the checkbox “nest label under” and then pick a suitable parent label from the list of labels which you have already created.

When You Should Use Nested labels In Gmail?

Nested labels are useful when you want further categorization for incoming emails. let’s take an example to understand when nested labels are useful and when they should be avoided.

Suppose you work with 3 clients – Tom, John and Harry. All of these clients are related with web designing, which is one of the part time jobs you do on the Internet. So it’s a good idea to create a parent label as “Freelance” or “Web design” and then create three labels with the name of Tom, John and Harry. These three labels will be child label of the main parent – “Web design”.

The advantage of using nested labels in Gmail is that you will spend less time and energy in finding all the messages from a specific client. Consider the categorization of a Library index – all the books are categorized into subjects and then into shelves.

Message Sneak Peak – Preview Email message with Right Click

The message sneak peak feature lets you to preview the content of an email on right click.

The message isn’t marked as read if you preview it so it’s a very good way to preview email messages. If you have keyboard shortcuts enabled in Gmail, you can preview the message using the “h” key. Both these features can be turned on from Gmail Settings > Labs, select the radio button “enable” and then click “Save changes”.