3 ways to be more productive with Gmail

I’ve used Gmail for years and love it! By enabling different features and setting up defaults how you want them, it has the potential to be one of the best productivity tools you use everyday in your coaching business.

Below are just 3 of the ways you can be more productive with it. I hope you find them useful 🙂

1. Canned Responses

Canned Responses is Gmail’s version of a template. If you send the same email over & over, for example a generic email to respond to enquiries, then setting up a template to use is a no-brainer!  Below is a step by step guide on how to do this.

Firstly you need to enable the actual setting. Click on the cog in the top right corner and select Settings…

Click into Labs and scroll down to Canned Response, click Enable and Save Changes…

Next, go to Compose an email and type in the text that you want to include in the template.  If you have a signature set up in your emails, you should delete it from this template before saving it otherwise it will appear twice!

Click on the More options arrow in the bottom right corner of the email, click on Canned Responses and select New Canned Response…

Then give it a name that you’ll recognise…

Discard the message. Go to Compose new email, click on the More options arrow in thebottom right corner, click Canned Responses and choose the name of the template under Insert…

…and the template email you set up will appear…

When you click on Canned responses you also have the options of saving the template, deleting it, or adding a new one.

And if you want to switch off the canned responses at any time, just go back into your Settings – Labs and disable canned responses. Though with all the time you save by using it,  I’m not sure why you’d want to switch it off 😉

2. Full screen default

This little tip is ideal to know if you automatically click to enlarge the email when you compose it. You can default it to open as full screen – watch my quick video below to find out how…

3. Send and archive

If you’re organised enough to archive your emails into relevant folders then this little gem will save you a few seconds each time you reply to a message.  It’s a feature called Send and Archive and it does exactly what it says on the tin 🙂

To access this feature, go to your Settings and scroll down to Send and Archive, tick the box next to Show and click Save.

Next time you reply to an email there will be an additional button to the left of the Send button which will send and archive it…

If you’re wondering where the unlabelled archived emails go, they are all in the All Mail folder.  Click on More on the left hand side of the screen and scroll down to All Mail. If you want to “un-archive” any email you can move it back to the inbox…

Gmail can be a fantastic tool and it’s worth digging around in the Settings and Labs sections to see what other little nuggets you can find to help you be more productive.

I came across this article which shares more tips to help you dig deeper – happy Gmailing 🙂