IT Manager's Journal

Labels are your friends

First, let's talk about labels, which is Gmail's tool for categorizing emails. Labels are sort of like folders, except better. Emails that I label "Project A" are organized together and viewable simply by clicking on the link "Project A" in the Gmail sidebar, like a folder. But unlike a folder, I can add as many labels as I like to an individual email, and Gmail classifies the email by each label, without making a physical copy of it. For example, if I add a new label called "From Robert" to one of my "Project A" emails, then I can find that email by clicking on either of the label links in the sidebar. Pretty useful, yet not particularly earth-shaking. But let's take the idea of labels a step further, with filters.

Filters find facts for follow up

Gmail lets me set up predefined filters for incoming emails by selecting and/or excluding keywords, subjects, phrases, dates, or specific recipients or senders, and applying labels (or performing other actions) according to my criteria. I can make the filter more accurate by running a test search on existing messages in my Gmail archive and further refining the criteria based on the results of the test search. Once I'm happy with the results, I can apply the filter to existing emails and set it to run on all future emails. Thanks to this feature, I don't have to manually apply labels to a 2GB archive of emails when I finally decide to get organized -- Google does it for me instantly. Even more useful, you might say, but the problem is that it only works on emails. The solution to that limitation is simply to expand the boundaries of what is traditionally classified as "email."

Think outside the (email) box

Usually, an email is some kind of message that includes a sender and one or more discrete recipients, and is sent from one computer's "outbox" to another computer's "inbox." But if I expand that definition to include messages I send to myself with Gmail, I now have a system of organization that automatically saves and classifies almost every bit of information related to my daily work. For example, when I take notes at a meeting with clients, I type them right into a Gmail composition screen. When I'm done, I add Notes: Project A to the subject line of my new email and send it to myself. (And if I go all A.D.D. and forget to send it, Gmail automatically saves it with a "Draft" label). I have already created a filter that looks for emails I send to myself that have the word "notes" in the subject line, which assigns the label "To write." I follow the same procedure when I take notes from a phone conference.

Everything is email-able

When it is time to write my weekly report, all my meeting and phone conversation notes are neatly stored under that label. I can even compose my report in Gmail, send it to my client(s), and it, too, is archived under the "Project A" label, along with the notes; and also under "To Robert" (or whatever recipient and label I specify in my filter). Another way to add information to my Gmail project file is to collect and label my online research by emailing links to myself and letting Gmail sort and label the emails according to my filters. And of course, I can also email attachments to myself: images, spreadsheets, even audio and video. Gmail can view/open most of them, either right in the browser with a helper application, or in Google documents. Urgent emails that come to my inbox are further marked with a star, and each morning I check the linked collection of starred emails to get my day started in the right direction. I can even route reminders from my Google calendar into my inbox and use filters and labels to sort and store them so I can easily see whom I need to talk to, and when.

Finally, I set Gmail as the start page in every browser I use, so whenever I get online the first thing I see is my system, which reinforces the habit of checking my stars and labels. With this system, I always know what I am supposed to write, whom I am supposed to call, and where all my files are. It's all right there, in Gmail.