How to be a GMail GTD Ninja in 5 Simple Steps

Me and many of my friends are struggling with keeping up with the huge amount of emails that they get each day. Each one has his/her own method to handle it. My friend Ouriel is as fast as lightning when it comes to answering emails. I, on the other hand, find the Getting Things Done methodology to be the best for managing my Inbox, and until there is a free GTD widget in GMail I had to come up with my own practical way of implementing it.

Since several people already asked about it, here's a short tutorial to show you what I mean in practical steps:

Step 1: Settings - Keyboard Shortcuts

Click on "Setting" at the top right menu, and under the "General" tab select "Keyboard shortcuts on".

Step 2: Multiply your inbox

Still in the "Settings", go to the "Labs" tab, where you can find a whole lot of great features that can make your GMail life easier. For the purpose of this tutorial we'll enable two of them, where the first one is "Multiple Inboxes".

This feature enables you to get different views of all of your email (not necessarily just your inbox items), and the cool thing is that you can determine what are the criteria for searching it.

To continue, click on "Save Changes", then click on "Settings" again, and lo and behold, there's a new "Multiple Inboxes" tab waiting just for you.

In this tab we'll create the search criteria and titles to fit our GTD needs.

I find the usage of GMail stars as marks for the status of the emails as the most convenient but labels can work just as well. In this example I'll use the "has:red-star" for "Urgent" things that must be taken care of today, "has:yellow-star" for things I want to "Follow Up", the "has:orange-guillemet" for "Waiting For" (don't look at me - it's Google's definition), "has:green-star" for "Later/Maybe", and "Label:Review" to things that I want to "Review" on the weekly review.

Step 3: Become a superstar

Still under "Settings", go to the "Labs" again, look for the "Superstars" feature, and set it to "Enable".

Now click "Save Changes" and click the "Settings" again. This is the last time. Promise.

Under the "General" tab, as shown in the first screen shot above, you can now find the "Superstars" section where you can drag the stars from "Not in use" to "In use" and vise-versa. In this example I have set the "In use" to the red star, yellow star, green star, orange (yes, the guillemet thing), and blue exclamation mark.

Step 4: Using labels

Now that you've done this hard work it's time to enjoy the fruits of productivity and reach the zero-inbox-zen.

In this example you can see my real inbox, with the setup of the previous steps. As you can see there's now one email in my Inbox (an invitation to Google Voice that unfortunately I can't do nothing with yet).

For the purpose of this example I'll put the email in my "Review" list by doing the following:

- Hit the "Enter"/"Return" button in your keyboard. this should open the email.

- Hit "l" on your keyboard. This should open the labels list.

-Start clicking the relevant label name such as "rev" for "Review" and Hit the enter once the cursor is there.

-Hit "e" to archive the email. If you know a little bit about GTD you know how important this step is. You no longer need to see this email in your Inbox.

-Optional: hit "g" then "i". this will take you back to your Inbox.

Your screen should now show the email only in under the "Review" section as shown in this screenshot:  

Step 5: Using Stars

This is my favorite usage.

You can assign the relevant star to an email very easily, like that:

- open the email

- click the "s" key to start toggle between the stars that you have defined in step 3. clicking once for the red star, twice for the yellow star, three times for the green, etc. You get the idea.

- click "e" to archive and to keep your Inbox clean.

Last but not least, you can do the usage described in steps 4 and 5 even without opening the email. You can simply click the "x" button to mark the email, navigate between your inbox emails by using "j" and "k", select multiple emails (with "x" again), and then press the "s" for stars, or "l" for labels.

If you have any other tips please write them in the comments.

Enjoy.