This email thing has really caught on. Whether or not it’s a regular part of your life now, it will become so at the latest when you begin college. And for something people spend so much time doing, most people are pretty bad at email.
“How can someone be bad at email?” you ask.
Let’s imagine someone who’s bad at making a bowl of cereal. So this person puts a bowl on the counter and takes out a box of cereal. They open the box and take one Cheerio and put it in the bowl. Then a second Cheerio. Then a third. 15 minutes later, they’re ready for the milk. They open the milk carton and carefully pour it into a teaspoon and then dump the teaspoon into the bowl. Then a second teaspoon, and then a third and fourth. Finally, 30 minutes after getting started, they’re ready to eat! (Thank goodness they didn’t want to add in any sugar.)
Now, if you were watching this person make a bowl of cereal, what would you say?
You’d go crazy. You’d want to pull your hair out. “Why would anyone ever be that incredibly inefficient?!” you’d think.
Well that’s me when I watch most people use email. Getting quick and efficient at using email can help you stay organized and save you a ton of time. Here are some tips to help you pour the email cereal:
Get on Gmail
In my experience (and I used Yahoo for four years), Gmail is far and away the best. If you use Yahoo, or AOL, or Hotmail, or whatever—give Gmail a try. Sign up for a free account, and if you agree that it’s superior to whatever you’ve been using, send one email to your contacts and tell them that you have a new email address, and just like that, you’re switched.
Keyboard Shortcuts
Once you’re on Gmail, go straight into Settings and turn “Keyboard Shortcuts” on. Then, once you refresh the page, you’ll be ready to use them. Start by pressing Shift + / to bring up a list of all the keyboard shortcuts Gmail offers (or check them out here). Beyond the obvious time-savers like C to compose a new message, R to reply, F to forward, etc., there are dozens more, all of which are useful. Also, to send a message, simply press Tab to highlight the Send key, and then Enter to send your message. Trust me—once you get used to these, you will never go back to clicking around Gmail with your mouse.
Archiving
In Gmail, there are two ways to maintain your inbox: 1) The old fashion way—let your messages pile up into the thousands, creating a never-ending inbox, or 2) The modern way—"archive" emails you’re done with, keeping your inbox clean and only containing messages you still need to read or answer. I can say with absolute conviction that the modern way is superior. The key is that archived messages haven’t gone anywhere—they’re sitting in the “All Mail” folder on the left, and you can either go to that folder or use the search feature to find an archived message at any time. Just type the name of someone on that email and maybe a word from the email or another recipient, and the archived message will be right in front of you again. Meanwhile, your inbox is clean and only contains messages you need to attend to, allowing your inbox to serve as your email “to-do” list.
You can bring in your own systems on top of this—you can “keep as new” messages you need to deal with more urgently, or tag them with a star, etc. Whatever works best for you.
(When I go through my emails, I simply press either k or ]. k leaves the message in my inbox and moves one to the next one, ] archives the message and moves to the next one. For me, it’s one or the other, unless it’s r to reply to the message.)
Labels
Labels can help you stay organized. Rather than putting an email in a “folder,” Gmail lets you tag emails with one or more labels that you create. Then when you click that label on the left side of the screen, every message you’ve tagged with that label is sitting there. For example, I created a label called “Flights” in my Gmail. When I book a flight online, I receive an email with the flight details. Since I know I’m going to need that email in a couple months—but I don’t want it to stay in my inbox that whole time and create clutter—I slap the “Flights” label on it (keyboard shortcut: when I’m in the message I press L to bring up the "choose a label" field and then type the first couple letters of “FLIGHTS” and press Enter and voila). Then, a couple months later when I need the email, I just go to the flights label and there it is.
Filters
If you’re a beginner, worry about the above items for now—but for the more advanced user, filters are the way to tell Gmail what you want it to do with messages. For example, if I get a weekly newsletter that I might want to read here and there, but I don’t want to be bothered with it popping into my inbox each week—I can create a filter that tells Gmail: “When a message comes in from the sender of this newsletter, apply a “newsletter” label to it and archive it before it even reaches my inbox.” So now I’ll never see another one of these newsletters in my inbox, but when I click on the “newsletter” label on the left, all of the newsletters will be sitting there. Cool, right? You can create filters in Settings.
Labs
Finally, once you get good at Gmail, head to Settings and go to the Labs tab. There you will find over a hundred little cool features that you may or may not want to activate in your Gmail. One of my favorites is “Undo Send,” which allows me to take back a sent message for 10 seconds after sending it—comes in surprisingly handy. Check them out.
Themes
While you’re in Settings, head to the Themes tab and make your Gmail page more interesting. My favorite is Tea House, which allows you to check out the daily life of a delightful little fox who lives at the bottom of your screen.
Good luck! This stuff may take some getting used to, but you’ll thank me one day (reminds me when my private SAT tutors said the same thing). For more on Gmail, check out the Gmail blog.
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