How does a Google SWE use Gmail?

As a Google SWE, I spend a lot of time on Gmail with tons of emails. There are many articles talking about how to set up Gmail to have more productivity. Today I am sharing my configurations with how and why. Of course, this is never considered optimal but it works for me so far.

Layout

TIP: You can click an image to zoom.

Enable multiple inboxes

Unless you are using a small screen, the default layout simply wastes too much spaces. Changing to multiple inboxes provides a single page view of all kinds of emails. To enable it, change Inbox type to Multiple inboxes in Quick Settings (The gear icon on the top right).

Then click the customize link, change below options.

• Multiple inbox sections
  • Section 1: Search query: is:!TODO and Section name: TODO
  • Section 2: Search query: is:;WAIT and Section name: WAIT
• Multiple inbox position: Right of the inbox
• Importance markers: No markers

These search queries are using label to group emails. Labels will be explained next.

Labels

Labels are used to group emails. This helps you organize your current emails and find emails based on your defined “type”.

Create a new label

A new label can be created in the bottom of All Settings – Labels. Click “Create new label” and simply enter the name. Let’s create two labels which are used for grouping emails mentioned in Layout section. They are named !TODO and ;WAIT.

Why they start with a special character? This helps you to quickly select them when using shortcuts.

Use labels to group emails

Open any email in inbox, click the Labels button and select/apply a label. Combine this with Multiple inboxes layout, you will have a view like below. After labeling your emails, you can archive them to make them disappear from Inbox but still in TODO or WAIT as long as they have the labels.

Shortcuts

Shortcuts will save a tons of time with no doubt. To enable it, check it in All Settings – General – Keyboard shortcuts.

Frequently used shortcuts

• ?: Show shortcuts menu.
• v: Move to. This works like remove the Inbox label and apply a label you choose. For example, to quickly move an email to TODO inbox, I can press v, ! and Enter with 1 second.
• e: Archive. For most emails I just read and press e to make it out of inbox. I also enable Auto-advance in All Settings – Advanced so that Gmail will show next email instead of inbox when I archive an email.
• m: Mute. For email threads I am not interested in, usually I press m to archive it and tell Gmail don’t move it back even there is a new reply.

As you can see, I don’t use most of shortcuts. But the above shortcuts are used hundreds of times per day. For compose and other actions, I tend to use mouse since they are less frequent.

Zen

Above tricks are mostly focusing on a multiple inboxes setup. To get most use of this layout, here are a few general rules to follow.

• Make Inbox always clean.
• Act and archive the emails in Inbox when you see it.
• If you can’t process the email immediately, move it to TODO inbox.
• If you need a response from an email, move it to WAIT inbox.

MISC

I have a few other settings to help my day to day emails. They are less important and some of them are specific for Google employees. Simply mention them here in case someone needs.

• I actually have a 4th inbox called ASAP. Emails in ASAP are supposed to be done in 3 days. TODO is for emails to be done by this week.
• I set Undo Send period to 30s so that I can read my outgoing emails and have a chance to recall them.
• I disabled all “Chat” features so I don’t have “double sidebars”.
• I have probably 80 filters to automatically organize important and noise emails.