Gmail Ramps Up Productivity with New Labels Feature

Gmail has been my task manager for quite some time now, and I use it on a day to day basis to keep track of what I need to do in the short, medium, and long term. Anything that can be done to make my Gmail even more productive, I’m all ears for. So, when I saw Google announcing a new feature for the Labels in Gmail, I had to try it out.

Hiding read labels

When you are using your Gmail inbox as a virtual to-do list, this new feature may be useful, depending on the system you developed. I used to use stars to separate my urgent to-do’s from my less urgent ones, and I’ll likely keep doing this. However, I’m going to be adding a new level of organization to my GMail Task Managing System: I will from now on categorize my tasks not just by priority, but also by topic.

For example, when I am at work, I want to try and not get distracted by all my person to-do’s. I will file my tasks as email messages and attach a particular label to them, for example “work”, or “private”. It is not possible to hide all labels that have no unread messages filed under them, so you are left with a list of labels that contain one or more unread messages. By keeping all tasks as “unread”, you can easily organize and visualize the number of tasks you have in each category.

How to hide all labels with read messages

To start, you first need to set up your account so that all labels containing only read messages are hidden:

1. Go into “Settings” in your Gmail account.
2. Navigate to the “Labs” tab.
3. Find the options that says “Hide read labels” (it is near the bottom of the page, but find it easily by just doing a search).
4. Select “enable”.
5. Save Changes, and you’re done!

Now, all you need to do is create some labels that correspond to categories of tasks you want to subdivide. For example, I am creating labels for work, home, and shopping. This can be done from the “labels” tab in the settings:

After filing a couple of messages according to my new task managing rules, the right side of my inbox now looks like this:

What do you think of this new labels feature? Useful? I think it is for task managing, but maybe there are other ways to use this function?