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With 3.1 hours a day spent on professional email and an additional 2.5 on personal accounts, it’s essential to speed up your inbox to save you significant time. Keeping your inbox organized and streamlined is a time-consuming task if you’re not using Gmail’s advanced search features, Gmail productivity tools, and automation techniques.
Employees report that 28% of their work time is spent on email, with the average person checking email 11 times per hour. Furthermore, 84% of employees constantly keep email open in the background while working, which contributes to the average worker spending more than 11 hours per week simply on email communication — that’s more than one full workday!
Eliminate Tasks With Email Productivity Apps
Productivity tools like Gmail tabs and sorting your Gmail inbox can significantly reduce the time spent on email, shifting focus back to larger, more critical tasks that increase sales and revenue and ultimately move the business forward.
For entrepreneurs and high-producing employees, email communication is never something you want to spend your entire day on. Instead, your focus should be on revenue-producing tasks, big picture strategy, and the long-term vision for your career.
If you want to reach inbox zero and free up significant time in your day, make sure you’re utilizing the best Gmail productivity tools and apps.
What Are Gmail’s Advanced Search Features?
Basic Gmail search only gets you so far — once you have dozens of emails coming in every day, it becomes more and more difficult to effectively search to find the most important communication. The default Gmail search resides in the top search bar, grabbing all relevant results from an email’s subject field, sender, and message contents. Toss in search results from Hangouts chats and calendar invites, and this basic search result gets even messier. This is time-consuming to sort through and also doesn’t guarantee you’ll even find what you’re looking for.
This is where Gmail’s advanced search features come in to save you time and help you work smarter. Gmail’s advanced search features allow you to customize your inbox for your work, giving you easy access to what you need to get your job done. Various fields help you reduce time spent searching, and these search filters might include the sent date, message size, sender name, subject phrase, and so on.
You can create as many Gmail filters as you want, but without organization, this also can eventually get confusing and frustrating to sort through.
Gmail Tabs
One of the best ways to save time is utilizing Gmail tabs. Gmail automatically lists your tabs in alphabetical order, which isn’t helpful when you’re trying to find the most important communication first.
Gmail Tabs by cloudHQ lets you customize and streamline Gmail to give you clear visibility and quick access to your favorite Gmail labels and common search queries like “emails with receipts” or communication from your boss.
A free Google Chrome extension, it allows you to create your own Gmail tabs with different font colors, background colors, and tab descriptions. It also helps you sort through sub-labels, creating easy-to-read hierarchies.
Download this productivity tool for free on the Google Chrome store.
Sort Gmail Inbox by Size, Sender, Date, Unread
No more searching for emails you need to find quickly — with Sort Gmail Inbox, you can find an email in seconds with free preset search filters. Set up the most popular search filters in your Gmail label area, so you can quickly find what you need.
With this email productivity tool, you can sort your Gmail inbox in many ways.
For example, you can sort your Gmail inbox with unread messages at the top, staying proactive about what is awaiting your reply and what isn’t.
You can also sort your Gmail inbox by a specific person or company if you’re constantly emailing an important client or organization. You can also sort by received date, keeping specific years, months, or exact dates organized together.
You can even set up SMS text alerts for when VIP contacts email you! No need to sit in your inbox all day long waiting for a notification. This kind of easy, streamlined sorting allows you to methodically work through your emails quickly, giving you time back in your day to relax or work on higher priority tasks.
Download Sort Gmail Inbox for free on the Google Chrome store.
Work Smarter With Gmail’s Advanced Search Features
With your freshly organized Gmail inbox working for you, not against you, you’ll find yourself zipping through this mindless part of your workday in minutes. Color-coded tabs, important emails right at the top, and common searches at your fingertips give you hours back in the day you didn’t even know you were missing.
Start working smarter with Gmail’s advanced search features and over 50 free Gmail email productivity tools like Sort Gmail Inbox and Gmail Tabs from cloudHQ.