I use labels in Gmail to organize my emails like everyone else. However, I use them differently then most people.

when I switched from Outlook to Gmail I simply copied my folders to Gmail-Labels. At first this wasn’t an issue but with upcoming projects and topics it got messy quite fast (yes my responsibilities grew with my new job too but this wasn’t the issue).

I had 35 labels when I started thinking that this shouldn’t be the case. 35 labels aren’t giving you anymore structure compared to just throw emails into the archive and use the search function. I caught myself creating the same labels for each project cause I treated them like folders.

if you want to avoid my mistake, continue reading, I explain how you can handle your inbox with just a few labels.

mandatory labels

for the Zero Inbox Method I use the following 3 labels are mandatory:

• Follow Up

• Waiting

• Read

these are temporary labels. You apply them, if necessary, and once you processed the email completely, you remove them.

if you don’t want to have a structure to your emails you can put everything into the archive, which is not deleting the mails but saving it for later reference.

you can reference to them by using the search function, however, this can take a while because your archive will keep growing obviously.

to narrow down the search from the beginning I came up with so called structured labels or multidimensional labeling.

structure labels

these labels will help you to find a specific email much quicker than putting everything into the archive.

to do that you have to think about a label like a tag or hashtag. One email can have multiple labels or tags. If you don't like the term "tag" you can also call them category.

but what kind of labels do you apply in Gmail?

as a project manager for a technical product I use these labels:

• Hardware contains all topics related to the hardware of the product

• Process contains all topics related to the different manufacturing steps along the value stream

• Quality contains topics which are related to the quality of the product (this could also be sorted into Hardware)

• Project A: everything related to that project gets this label

• Project X: continue with all the projects you have

• Customer M contains everything related to this customer

• Customer X: you get the idea?!

of course these labels are highly dependent on how your work looks like.

be a genius

you might guess it by now: Don’t create to much labels. I have seen people with roughly 100 labels for their inbox. Most of them are copies like the logistics-label for every single project-label.

find the common categories within your work and create overall labels for those them.

and don’t forget that you can add sub-labels still. If you have a lot of different projects I recommend to create one label that is called “projects”. All your projects will be sub-labels to this label. This gives you the benefit to hide all your projects in the sidebar of Gmail.

searching for more than one label is also possible! You can even add a search term. This brings down the number of emails you have to look at.

trial phase for G-Drive

as you might now, there are labels for G-Drive as well. I am currently checking them out myself. Once I am done with testing I will let you know what I think.

one thing is for sure: I will not skip the folder structure I explained in this article! Within the automotive industry you need to store your files with a certain structure to it. This is even part of audits by external companies.

thank you for your time,

daniel