Some days I feel like I could spent all day trudging through my email accounts and still feel like I’ll never get caught up. This is one of the reasons I don’t spend much time blogging — when I’m not at work I avoid the computer because of the looming mountain of email, or I get sucked into email management and suddenly my non-work computing energy is gone.
Keyboard Shortcuts Dull The Pain (A Little)
In my many years of Gmail use, keyboard shortcuts have always been important1. Two of my favorites are ‘[‘ and ‘]’, which archive the current conversation and move to the previous or next conversation. They are great for dealing with the promotion and update tabs: 1) scan or read the message, 2) tag if necessary, 3) tap [ or ] to go forward or backwards.
A little while ago, I took another look at the list of shortcuts and noticed that ‘#’ will delete a conversation (Gmail’s storage is sizeable, but with the torrent of email, it can eventually fill up). That’s great, but to truly make it useful, you need to change additional settings. Let’s step through the process
First, change your Gmail settings to turn on keyboard shortcuts and “auto-advance”. Click the gear in the upper right corner, then click “See all settings”.
Next, go to the General tab and click the “Keyboard shortcuts on” option.
Then go to the Advanced tab, and click the “Enable” radio button for Auto-advance. Note that the direction for auto-advance (whether it goes backward or forward in your email list) is set in the General tab.
Finally, take a look at the list of keyboard shortcuts, as there are many more useful ones in Gmail. I use ‘j’, ‘k’, and ‘x’ a lot when I’m cleaning my email lists. ‘j’ moves the selection down one message, ‘k’ moves up one message, and ‘x’ selects a message. That’s great if you have a bunch of consecutive messages that you want to delete or archive — just tap ‘j’ then ‘x’ multiple times, and the ‘#’, ‘[‘, or ‘]’ key when you’re done.
Once you have the settings configured, here is one routine you can use to speed up your trudge through your personal email quagmire:
- Open a message
- Decide if you want to file it, archive it, delete it, or move to the next message (i.e., put it off until later).
- File it: select the folder where it should be filed (‘v’ shortcut); or Label it: select the tag for that message (‘l’ shortcut)
- Archive it: ‘[‘ or ‘]’, depending on which direction you want to move in your email. The next message will appear
- Delete it: ‘#’. The next message will appear.
- ‘j’ or ‘k’ to move to the previous or next message without changing the status of the current message
An Email Dream
A New Year’s wish: an annual “update of the e-mailing lists”, in which ALL newsletter/sales pitch/advertisement providers send an annual OPT-IN message to subscribers. If you don’t reply with an opt-in, you’ll never get another email from them until you ask for it. Or perhaps a rule that if I buy or donate something, they are allowed just one email for each dollar you spent. So for the $50 I spent at vendor X, they can send me 50 emails, not 4 emails a day until I find the tiny Unsubscribe link. To be sure, there are a few that perform periodic list clearing, i.e., “Please click this link if you want to continue hearing from us”. I suspect this would be popular, but could it be legislated?
I’d like to see the same thing for non-profit solicitations. An annual mailing with a form that asks “Should we remove you from our mailing list?” (and might also ask for money, perhaps phrased as “If you are leaving our mailing list, would you like to make a goodbye donation?”
But I probably never will. The incentives are all in favor of sending more emails. Once someone has your email, it costs them nothing to send one every day, and we’re all so used to being blasted by every company and non-profit that we can’t hold a strong enough grudge to never deal with them again.
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