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Business News/ Technology / News/  The 15-minute Gmail fix: How to organize your inbox so you don’t miss important messages
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The 15-minute Gmail fix: How to organize your inbox so you don’t miss important messages

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With just a few tweaks to your settings, our Fixer columnist believes you can quell the chaos of incoming meeting invitations, requests from managers and even spam

My problem, and yours, is that we want things to arrive already organized, so we don’t have to waste time as a harried operations directorPremium
My problem, and yours, is that we want things to arrive already organized, so we don’t have to waste time as a harried operations director

My inbox is full of important emails that are being buried alive by trivial ones. Please advise!

Here’s the first step in the journey to an organized email inbox: Unsubscribe from as much junk as you can. But even if you manage to curb the onslaught, some notes still slip through. As my colleague Nicole Ngyuen recently reported, Gmail and Outlook offer features that promise to help solve the problem. But I’ve found that Gmail’s organizational tools mostly just help you manage emails you’ve already received.

My problem, and yours, is that we want things to arrive already organized, so we don’t have to waste time as a harried operations director. I’ve found some relief via the gear-shaped Settings icon. Hit “See all settings," and tab over to “Inbox," then under “Inbox type," check “Unread first." This helpful arrangement brings all unread emails to the top of your queue, making the “mark unread" button your best friend.

Alas, not all unread emails are equal. But I found a way to use the “Multiple Inboxes" option in “Inbox type" to rearrange things so that unread messages from my co-workers appear first, then those from a group of freelance contractors. Everything else pools below.

To get this setup yourself, you first have to create a filter for emails from specific addresses. Start by clicking the icon (it looks like a stack of three lines) on the right of the inbox search bar. In the “From" line, place all the addresses of everyone whose messages you want grouped together within a set of curly brackets, i.e. {JohnDoe@email.com, JordanDoe@email.com, …}. This is annoying, but less so if you do it first in a separate document, then paste it in.

When you’re done, click “Create Filter" and an option called “Apply the Label" appears. Name your new label—“Coworkers," for instance—avoiding punctuation or spacing, then hit “Create Filter" again. Now, you can use that label to customize the “Multiple Inboxes" set up back in the aforementioned “Inbox type" drop-down menu. Enter “label:coworkers is:unread" in the “Search Query" field for the first section, so that unread emails labeled “coworkers" appear first in your inbox. Populate the other sections with whatever else you want (is:starred, for example, shows all your starred emails). Director of operations, no more!

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