Top 7 Gmail Tips for Productivity 📧
About this video
Jeff Su shares seven Gmail tips with workplace use cases. One, Schedule Send: use the arrow beside the Send button to write an email while details are fresh and deliver it later — after an informational interview or one-on-one, write the follow-up at 5:00 PM referencing conversation highlights and schedule it for 9:30 the next morning; he also pre-writes Christmas greeting e-cards to send on Christmas Eve, with the caveat not to use scheduling to fake working late or on weekends. Two, find a forgotten external contact with a wildcard domain search: typing “**@ey.com” in quotes lists his former EY (Ernst & Young) colleagues, because the asterisk stands for anything — useful when job hunting or reconnecting with a client contact as long as you remember the company’s domain. Three, declutter the sidebar by setting labels to Show if Unread from the three-dot menu, so a label stays hidden until an unread email lands in it, which pairs well with automated filters. Four, create filters for whole mailing groups quickly: from a message’s three-dot menu choose ‘Filter messages like these’, refine with a ‘has the words’ condition, and apply actions — his PayPal example adds the word ‘voucher’ so only the voucher notifications (he mentions 40 Hong Kong dollar vouchers) are skipped past the inbox and marked read while account statements still arrive, and he applies the filter to the six matching conversations. Five, create infinite aliases with the plus sign: Gmail delivers username+anything to you, so colleagues can send time-sensitive mail to his +ooo address out of office with a filter labeling it urgent; newsletter signups go to a +newsletter alias that a filter auto-labels and skips past the inbox; and signing up with a company’s own name in the alias reveals if that address gets shared with other companies. Six, enable Templates under Settings > Advanced so repeated emails can be created, saved, modified, and inserted from the Compose window — suited to canned responses and recurring newsletter formats.
Key takeaways
- Write follow-up emails while the conversation is fresh but schedule-send them for the next morning — and never fake working late with the feature.
- Find a forgotten contact by searching the wildcard domain pattern (e.g. “**@ey.com”) when you remember the company but not the name.
- Set crowded labels to ‘Show if Unread’ so the sidebar only surfaces labels that need attention, especially labels fed by filters.
- Build group filters from ‘Filter messages like these’, narrow them with a ‘has the words’ term, and apply them to existing matching conversations.
- Use plus aliases as a routing system — a +urgent alias colleagues use out of office, a +newsletter alias auto-labeled and skipped past the inbox, and per-company aliases that expose who shared your address.
Episode details: published February 24, 2021 · 7:43 long. Summary written by Self Growth Videos from the episode itself. Business results and any income figures mentioned are Jeff Su’s own claims, shared for education — they are not typical or guaranteed.
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