How Inbox by Gmail Works, and How to Use It for More Productive Email85,84414

Eric Ravenscraft

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Eric RavenscraftFiled to: google

email inbox gmail productivity work

Wednesday 10:00am

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Last week, Google released a brand new email service called Inbox. If you're new to Inbox or just confused about what it does and how it works, here's what we've found after a week of using it as a daily driver.

Currently, Inbox is invite-only for the moment, but invites seems to be going out at a steady pace (and there are workarounds).

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Forget What You Know (Or: Email As a To-Do List)

Before we dive into the features of Inbox, it helps to address what Inbox is. The first problem most people are likely to have is that they don't know what buttons do. For Example, when Whitson first signed up, he asked me "What does marking an email as 'Done' do? Mark it read? Archive it?"

These questions have an answer. Inbox still syncs to Gmail and has an effect on how email is handled there. However, the question is the bigger problem. Terms like "marked as read", and "archived" are deliberately phased out. Instead, Inbox treats your emails like to-dos. The app assumes (perhaps rightly so) that you need to do something with every email. Some are critical pieces of information you need to sort or set aside, some demand replies, and some inform you that you need to do something outside your inbox like pay a bill. In all of those cases, "reading" an email doesn't mean you're done with it, so why treat it as such?

In this author's opinion, that's the key distinction that makes everything else fall into place. As you use Inbox, try to avoid translating the new functionality into old terminology. We'll explain what the buttons do on the backend (in case you ever go back to Gmail, you don't want to screw up your entire flow), but the best way to dive into Inbox is head first, without looking back.

The Three Classes of Email: Pinned, Snoozed, or Done

With Inbox, you are given a few options for dealing with email. The three primary actions you can take on emails are to pin them, snooze them, or mark them as done. Here's what those three functions do (as well as their counterparts in Gmail proper):

Pin: When you pin an email, it gets more prominent placement in your inbox. If it was part of a bundle (which we'll elaborate on later), it will be given its own line so it's more visible. There's also a large switch at the top of the app on all platforms to show only pinned emails. If it's something you'll need to come back to like travel confirmation, reference documents, or an important conversation, pinning it is probably the right way to go. There is no Gmail counterpart to pinning.

Snooze: Boomerang users will be familiar with the idea of snoozing an email for later. You may need an email but not necessarily right now. Inbox allows you to snooze it so it disappears from your inbox and comes back at a later time. You can specifiy a specific time, use vague presets like "tomorrow afternoon" or let Google decide with a "Someday" option for things you don't want to deal with now, but that aren't time-sensitive. If you view your inbox in Gmail, snoozed messages will be archived.

Done: This is for when you don't need a message anymore. Marking an email as "Done" removes it from your inbox or visible bundles. You can still search for it, but it won't be cluttering everything up. In Gmail this also archives your messages and the functionality is similar in Inbox.

There are other features of Inbox (and we'll get to them), but these are the primary ways you're meant to deal with emails. You either need it now, you need it later, or you don't need it. Seems pretty straightforward.

Staying Organized: Reminders and Bundles

Reminders

Snoozing an email to remind you about it later only brings the message up when you need it. Reminders, however, allow you to make notes to your future self. Get a promotional email with something you actually want to buy? Set a reminder for "Christmas gift for X." The reminder will be included next to the email itself.

Of course, Google Now users will recognize Reminders. You can also use your phone, tablet, watch, or probably your brain soon to set natural language reminders like "Remind me to pay my bills when I get home." If you use those reminders, they now show up in your inbox as well. Since Inbox treats entries like a to-do, and your reminders to yourself are, presumably, things that also need to get done, they're put in line together.

Bundles

Putting together reminders, emails, and the extra information cards Inbox adds can make it difficult to parse information. That's where Bundles come in. Bundles group related emails together in your inbox. For example, promotional emails from Amazon, NewEgg, and Apple would all be grouped together in one, collapsible bundle. You can also mark an entire bundle "done" with one button.

Bundles combine labels, filters, and Gmail's smart tabs all in one. Here's where things get a little wonky. Your old tabs, like Promos and Updates (as well as a few new ones), are Google-made bundles with their own special rules you can train or override. Your old labels do get imported, but they function much more like folders. Adding a message to one of your existing labels

manually will remove it from the inbox entirely. All of these old labels are now in a category called "Unbundled" in the sidebar.

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You can also create your own bundles out of existing labels, or by making new ones. Click the label in the sidebar and, in the action bar at the top, click Settings. Here, you can create rules for this label. When you do this, it turns it into a bundle for all future emails. While in Gmail, filters and labels were separate things, here they are tied directly together.

From now on, any emails you get that fit these rules will behave the same as Google's own bundles in terms of grouping. Your inbox will automatically put any new emails you get that fit the filters into one, collapsible bundle. You can also access them from the sidebar. Unfortunately, one downside compared to labels is that you can't apply this to past emails.

Beyond Email: Embeded Info and Google Now

One of the last, neatest features of Inbox is that it aims to provide you with the information you need without actually having to dive into an email, or search for information elsewhere. Emails with flight information will show the status of your flight. Emails with photo attachments will embed the photographs in your inbox, rather than requiring you to open the message directly.

This is all neat (though in my experience, information cards very rarely appear for typical emails). However it also means that if you're not a fan of Google Now or data scanning, Inbox may not be for you. These smart features are built into the app and non-optional. There isn't a button anywhere to request that Google not show you suggestions based on the content of your email. If that bothers you, skip Inbox.

For everything else, though, Inbox is a great new approach to email. The service understands that you're not just reading your email, you're doing things with it. It also understands that you get a lot of email and need to sort through things quickly. For a modern, productive world, it makes a heck of a lot more sense to mark an email as "done" than "read.

Everything You Need to Know About Gmail's New, Super-Confusing Layout

263,58712

Melanie Pinola

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Melanie PinolaFiled to: gmail

google how to filters email inbox explainers

6/07/13 9:00am

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If you haven't heard yet, Gmail is rolling out a new tabbed interface for the inbox on both desktop and mobile. At first glance, this looks great for email organization. On further inspection, these new tabs are confusing as hell. Here's how to make sense of the new tabs and customize them for your own filters.

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How the New Tabbed Interface Works

Google describes the new tabs as a way to "put you back in control so that you can see what's new at a glance and decide which emails you want to read and when."

You get five optional tabs, described by Google below. Google automatically sorts your inbox into these tabs using its special algorithms (essentially matching many of Gmail's existing Smart Labels, which automatically filter incoming messages):

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Primary: person-to-person conversations and messages that don't appear in other tabs Social: messages from social networks, media-sharing sites, online dating services, and

other social websites Promotions: deals, offers, and other marketing emails Updates: personal, auto-generated updates including confirmations, bills, receipts, bills,

and statements Forums: messages from online groups, discussion boards, and mailing lists

You can also choose to force starred emails from all tabs to display in the Primary tab (in addition to the other tab).

How to Enable and Use the Tabs

To enable the new tabbed view, go to the Gear icon and select "Configure inbox." Once you do that, you'll be prompted to choose which tabs to enable and Gmail will start doing its magic, auto-sorting your inbox.

You can drag-and-drop emails from one tab to the next; when you do that, Gmail will ask if you want to create a filter for that sender to send messages in the future to that tab. Handy! It doesn't, however, move existing emails into that tab.

You can also create your own filters to send emails into specific tabs, as we'll see below, but that's tricky if you don't understand how the new tabs differ from Gmail's existing labels and which messages get sorted into tabs.

Why the Tabs Are So Confusing

The tabs do give you a convenient way to automatically sort your inbox according to Gmail's preset categories and get notifications at a glance for when new emails come in. However, the tabbed view introduces a new, not-so-clear element in Gmail called "categories."

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The tabs are based on these new categories. When you create a filter, in addition to being able to label a message, you can now categorize it as: Personal, Social, Updates, Promotions, or Forums from a drop-down box. These, as you see, match the tabs.

The problem is, you already have labels that also match these categories. Gmail, for example, adds Social Updates, Promotions, and Forums as SmartLabels in the left menu. The "Notifications" SmartLabel corresponds to the Updates tab (I wonder why they didn't just call the tab Notifications), but SmartLabels are not the same as Categories. Gmail's pre-designed SmartLabel filters makes it seem like that, but they're really two different things.

I also noticed one problem where certain messages would show up under a SmartLabel, but not a category. For example: Some auto-labeled "Notifications" didn't show up under my "Updates" tab.

It turns out the tabs only include emails from your inbox, not archived emails. In other words, the tabs are really just another view of your inbox. You can have more emails in the corresponding label than in the tabs if some of those emails are archived.

So, a few things we've discovered from testing:

If you have filters for daily deals emails and similar emails that would get categorized by Gmail as "Promotions" but have it set to skip the inbox (archive them), you won't see them in the Promotions tab unless you change those filters. The same goes for the other tabs.

If you want to filter messages into a specific tab, you'll have to use the new "Categorize" option, not the labels.

Gmail has added a new "Categories" label in the left menu with sub-labels for the categories, which match the tabs. In other words, all the messages under specific tabs are also in the corresponding Categories sub-label. Tip: If you want to briefly switch away from tabbed view and see all the emails at once across all the tabs, click on the Categories label.

Now you'll have labels and categories with the same names. If you want to avoid confusion, you can just delete the old SmartLabels, since you can still access them through the categories in the sidebar. Alternatively, you could just hide them from the sidebar so they don't clutter it up.

If you want to see the unread count for messages in the tabs, you have to click the Categories label name to expand the sub-labels. The tabs themselves only show when you have new messages, not the number of unread messages.

Continuing on that theme, the unread count in the inbox label and browser tab only show the Primary tab number of unread messages, not all of your unread messages. That is by design.

As mentioned above, when drag-and-dropping across tabs, you can create a new filter for future messages. However, this doesn't work if you select multiple email messages and drag them, unfortunately.

Confused yet? Gmail's SmartLabels aren't perfect, and neither are the tabs. Gmail has been consistently labeling some personal emails as Promotions and putting some promotional emails in the Primary tab for me. It also seems like there's a fine line between Social and Forums messages.

All of this said, it may be possible to harness the organizational power of the new tabbed interface to suit your needs better.

How to Customize the Tabs with Your Own Filters

As mentioned above, you can now create your own filters to categorize messages, thus putting them in one of these tabs. So if you have no use for the "Forums" tab, you can instead use it to collect messages from specific senders or keywords. Unfortunately, there's no way to change the tab name.

The key is to make sure the filter doesn't overlap an existing filter that might counteract what you're trying to do. For example, you can't have "Skip the inbox" on a matching filter, otherwise it won't appear in the tabs at all (since the tabs are organization for the inbox).

To customize the tabs:

1. Create a new filter for the messages you want moved to one of the tabs. (For example, since I have no use for the Social tab on my work email, I'm using it instead to store emails I send to myself from my personal email address. In the search box, I put in "from:[my email address]" and click the down arrow in the search box to find the "Create filter with this search" link.)

2. In the filter options in the next screen, choose the category that matches the tab for the "Categorize as" option. (E.g., I chose "Categorize as: Social.")

3. You'll also have to check "Exclude from SmartLabels" just in case Gmail tries to categorize your email differently (as it did for one of my test emails to myself). Then hit "Create filter."

4. If you also want to prevent Gmail auto-categorizing other messages in that tab, you could also go into your Settings > Filters and scroll to the bottom for the SmartLabel Filters and disable or edit the corresponding filter. However, do this with caution, as it seems there's no easy way to restore the built-in filter. It might be better to configure Gmail's SmartLabels so they skip the inbox and thus skip your tabs. About.com's Email site has

the list of each SmartLabel (e.g., "label:^smartlabel_promo" for Promotions). When creating your filter, search for that "label:^" term to filter it out as you'd like.

At the very least, the new "Categorize as:" filter can help you correct any Gmail errors when it comes to SmartLabels. For example, by creating a filter to categorize fellow Lifehacker editors' emails as "Personal," they now appear in my Primary tab, instead of, oddly, the Promotions or Forums one. They're still strangely "Smart"Labeled as Promotions, but at least they're in the right tab.

How to Disable the Tabbed Inbox If You Don't Like It

If you don't like the new feature, it's pretty easy to get a more traditional inbox back. Just click on the settings cog in the upper right-hand corner, go to "Configure Inbox," and uncheck everything except "Primary." This will remove the tabs and bring you back to the old, familiar, one-inboxed interface.

Thinking about Gmail's new tabs, SmartLabels, regular labels, and filters can feel like you're trying to solve an annoying circular reference error in Excel. However, the new tabbed view might come in handy if you know how to harness it.

How to Debug Your Brain and Build Better Habits42,245

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Oliver Emberton - Quora

Filed to: habits

healthy habits debugging mind hacks republished

Today 2:00pm

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Wouldn't it be great if you could debug your brain as though it were bad code? We might not be able to reprogram ourselves, but we can use the principles of debugging to help ourselves build better habits. Here's how to debug your brain.

Our brains are the most bug ridden pieces of junk since Internet Explorer. To replicate one common bug, try telling your brain to "go to the gym." Most brains will respond by updating their Facebook status and watching cat videos. This is not the desired behavior.

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Fortunately I've developed a fix. Let me just explain how the whole human brain works first.

This Code Is a Mess

Looking at our brain, it's clear it was developed by a team of ten thousand monkeys sitting at keyboards. You know, like Windows 8.

The brain is event-driven, which is to say it does almost nothing until an event occurs, and then it responds to the event. Your hand gets hot, you pull it back. Your stomach rumbles, you look for food.

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Unfortunately there are a lot of events. There are events for shiny objects coming into view, or for scary monsters, and all of these events are firing in our brain and competing for our limited processing ability.

It's as if the developers were too late to realize this would leave us bouncing between distractions like a cat chasing a laser pointer, and so they hacked in last-minute a priority system.

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Unfortunately, our priority system isn't that great; the default priority for sitting down is higher than the priority for working out.

But Wait! We're Smarter Than—Ooh, a Squirrel

Don't we have some kind of clever, conscious brain though? The part that does math and plays chess and copies Sally's homework?

Well, yes. But that part is event driven too, which is to say it's not on all the time. It turns out our brains were optimized for energy efficiency, and they only turn on their CPU (Consciousness Processing Unit) when absolutely necessary. If you've ever realized you've been driving for an hour and hadn't even noticed, that was your consciousness going into Standby Mode.

It's your consciousness that tells you to exercise, even if you don't want to, because it can see the long term benefits are greater than the short term pain. And when it's in control, you do so. But consciousness demands a lot of power. When your mental battery is low, it's easily overpowered out by higher priorities, like playing Hearthstone or checking Twitter.

The Bug Fix

We're going to add a new event of our own to fix things. Non-programmers might call this a "habit."

Our new event is triggered by a transition. For example, if you wake up, that's a transition. Arrive at your desk—that's a transition. Arrive home—that's a transition.

It's at the transition that our behavior is most likely to be hijacked by the highest priority event that happens to be in our brain at the time. If you've arrived home, chances are that event is "I'm knackered" and you'll fall onto the sofa. We need to change that. Here's your new event:

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Don't worry if you're not fluent in Brain Programming (B#)—just remember three words: "No. Right. Now." Let's break it down.

1. "No"

Firstly, we need to interrupt all other events. There's a trick for overpowering mental distractions, and that's to make your intention insanely simple. "No" is about as simple an intention as you can get.

No means simply reject everything. If you want to check Facebook, the answer is no. If someone is asking you if you have five minutes, the answer is no. If this will piss someone off, it's still no.

Don't complicate this with exceptions. Exceptions will happen anyway—if your house is on fire, primal instincts will take over. But 99.9% of the time, in our comfortable modern lives, the greatest danger to you is that you live by your outdated survival impulses. Start by saying no to everything.

You might worry that by declining everyone and everything you'll become some kind of sociopathic robot. You'll still have time for those distractions later. Tell people that. The trick is to get done what matters first.

2. "Right"

Now ask yourself what is the one "right" thing you should be doing now. I did not say three things. There can be only one.

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You shouldn't need to think about this much, because your conscious brain should already have decided for you the night before: it's usually the one thing you want yourself to do all the time, but never find time for.

A crucial distinction here is importance versus urgency. The most important things in life—like eating healthy—are rarely urgent. And our brain's buggy events are great at dealing with urgent things—like the phone ringing—all by themselves. So when given the choice, choose importance over urgency. It makes the most difference in the long run.

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3. "Now"

Start doing the right thing immediately. Not after you've checked your email– immediately. Don't give yourself time to even think about it, just start. Starting is always the hardest part; the very inertia which makes something hard to start can make it equally hard to stop.

This simple fix works because when you transition from one place to another, your brain is unusually receptive to events. It needs to decide on a new course of action, and once it chooses one it tends to stick to it.

Unfortunately we tend to make stupid decisions at transitions, because we don't think about them:

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Interrupt your transitions with the right choices, and you'll find yourself doing what matters far, far more often:

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Just remember: "No. Right. Now." Three short words to program a life-changing habi

What It Takes to Form a Good Habit216,408

3

Whitson Gordon

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Whitson Gordon

Filed to: Mind Hacks

Habits Psychology Resolutions willpower Resolutions 2011

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1/04/11 8:00am

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It's that time of year when we all start to make "New Year's resolutions", which is a fancy way of saying we'll try forming better habits. Here are a few tips to make sure they stay habits beyond the month of January.

Photo by Steven Fernandez.

Often, our New Year's resolutions are us promising ourselves we'll form good habits this year: whether it's something big like "I'm going to eat better" or "I'm going to keep my computer backed up" to "I'm going to actually start flossing every day". So often, though, these habits end up dying off pretty quickly. Here are a few ways to make sure your resolutions become habits and don't become another resolution in the garbage.

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Make Sure Your Life is In Order

Photo by Magic Madzik.

While there's a certain charm to the "no better time than now" idea behind forming good habits, the fact of the matter is that your willpower is limited. Psychology Today recommends waiting until your life is in order (at least somewhat) before forming a new habit. If stressed, working on some other form of personal growth, or otherwise not in a normal daily routine, you'll find it much harder to keep up with a good habit.

Focus on One Good Habit

We won't sugarcoat it for you: forming good habits can be tough. Habits are something that are deeply ingrained in our behavior, which is why quitting a bad habit is so hard. Similarly, starting up a good habit is going to take a lot of work and conditioning before it becomes something

automatic. If you try to take on too much at once, you are probably setting yourself up for failure. So focus on just one good habit for now—even if it's a small one—and move on to the others later.

Work Yourself Into it Gradually

While your goal may be to end up doing something every day (like, say, exercising), it's unlikely that you're going to be able to reach that goal right out of the gate. It's going to take time and willpower to condition yourself, so don't beat yourself up if you miss days at the beginning. Start ramping up that good habit gradually for a more successful habit forming.

Part of this is setting goals for yourself. If you can set a different goal, say, each week, you can motivate yourself without getting overwhelmed. Try exercising just two or three days the first week, then set a slightly higher goal for the next week, and so on. As you get more used to the act of exercising during the day, it'll become easier for you to work toward your end goal of working out every day.

Piggyback it With Other, Already-Formed Habits or Routines

eHow notes that a really great way to help yourself remember to do certain things is to "piggyback" them with other habits or routines you already have. Say you want to start flossing daily. Flossing is one of those habits that we neglect more often because we forget, rather than us just being lazy. Put the floss in a conspicuous place by your toothbrush, and every time you brush your teeth, grab the floss and do a quick run-through. Similarly, if you want to start taking

vitamins, stick the bottle in your coffee mug so every time you go to make your coffee in the morning, you can pop your multivitamin for the day.

Get an Accountability Buddy

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Photo by Lululemon Athletica.

We've talked about this before, and it's an oldie but a goodie: get a buddy to help you stay accountable. Motivating yourself to go to the gym every day or start eating better can be difficult when you're on your own, but if you have someone else around with whom you can exercise or eat with often, you're more likely to keep up with those activities.

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Stick With It for 21 Days

Photo by Mjmonty.

When you decide on that final goal, it can seem a bit overwhelming ("I want to exercise every day...for the rest of my life"). Once you turn a resolution into a habit, though, things are going to get a lot easier, and research shows it shouldn't take that long. It takes about 21 days for a habit to form, so as long as you keep up your motivation, set your gradual goals, and kept up that resolution for three or four weeks, the hard part's probably over. That habit's now ingrained in your brain to the point where remembering it and being motivated to do it has become automatic instead of something you need to force yourself to do. This doesn't mean quit trying after 21 days, of course—it'll still probably take a bit of work—but if you're feeling discouraged at any point in the process, it's a good thing to aim for, knowing that in just a few weeks it'll be a bit less difficult.

We've all tried to form good habits in the past, and while these are some great tips for starting out, they certainly aren't the only strategies in the habit-former's arsenal. If you've successfully formed a good habit in the past, share with us what worked for you (and what didn't) in the comments.

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How to Trick Your Brain to Create a New Healthy Habit119,311

13

Deane Alban

Filed to: psychology

habits willpower motivation goals brains brain hacks health mind hacks republished

7/23/13 2:00pm

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Have you ever started a diet or exercise program but didn't stick with it? If you're like millions of other people, you've set out with the best intentions but failed to keep the momentum going. Here's why relying on motivation and willpower doesn't work (and what works instead).

When you begin any new self-improvement program, your enthusiasm is high and you're motivated by the pleasure of what you want or the pain of what you don't want. But motivation naturally diminishes with time.

When your motivation wanes, you rely more on willpower. But no one has an endless supply of willpower. It's a resource that gets "used up." Every time you will yourself to do something that you don't really want to do, you use up some willpower. It's as if every temptation you pass up depletes your willpower reserve. By evening, you may find you have no willpower left. That's why most people blow their diet in the evening after eating healthy all day. If motivation and willpower aren't working for you, there's another way!

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95% of our life is dictated by the subconscious mind, the part of our brain that runs our lives on autopilot. This is why you can do everything from brushing your teeth to driving a car without thinking about it. By consciously deciding to create a new habit, you can harness the power of your unconscious to create a new neural pathway. Once a new habit is established it becomes easy to do—motivation and willpower are no longer required.

Here are seven steps to turn any desired new activity into a habit. Once a habit is established, you'll find yourself doing it effortlessly. These techniques can be used for any habit you want to make or change—diet, exercise, meditation, stress reduction, sleep habits, etc.

Set Small Goals

Setting big goals is exciting but starting with small, boring goals is more likely to lead to success. A small goal, for example, would be to meditate for 10 minutes, or replace one unhealthy snack with raw veggies, or walk 15 minutes per day. Taking small actions tricks your brain. Your subconscious likes to be in control—it doesn't like change. A big change often sets up subconscious resistance, but you can sneak a small change by it.

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Use Triggers

A trigger is something that leads you to automatically doing something else. Many smokers, for example, are often triggered to smoke after a meal. Use triggers to your advantage. If you commit to always meditating after breakfast, then after a few weeks you'll automatically think about meditating after your morning meal. Visual triggers work well, too. Laying your workout clothes on the bed in the morning will encourage you to work out when you get home from work.

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Do It Early

Exercise or meditate in the morning when your willpower is high, and you'll reap the rewards all day. Make a healthy dinner ahead of time (I love my crockpot!) so you don't come home starving, with nothing to eat.

Be Prepared

Make sure you have everything you need to ensure your success. If you want to start a walking program, get comfortable walking shoes and a pedometer. (People who wear a pedometer walk 27% more than those who don't.)

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Make it Convenient

The more difficult and time consuming it is to take an action, the less likely you will do it. This is why so many people who buy gym memberships drop out—it's just not that convenient. Get everything you need ready ahead of schedule so that when it is time to take action, you can, as Nike says, "Just Do It."

Make it Fun

If you don't enjoy doing something, you aren't going to stick with it. Find ways to make your lifestyle change as enjoyable as possible. Exercise with a friend, learn to cook healthy foods that are delicious, or find a meditation program that really resonates with you.

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Don't Break the Chain

When Jerry Seinfeld was an unknown, he created the habit of writing new material daily using a wall calendar and a red marker. Every day that he managed to write, he would put a big red "X" on the calendar. He didn't want to see any blank days that "broke the chain." Use this technique for one month and you'll find your new habit will largely be formed.

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By using these steps to create a habit, you're tricking your brain into creating a new neural pathway. Once the habit is formed, you can use it to serve as a gateway to bigger changes that can truly change your life. A journey of a thousand miles really does begin with a single step