Last year I created an online video course about mastering your email inbox, reducing the clutter, and eliminating stress and uncertainty from your email process.
Now with Inbox, it gets even easier.
From Google:
Your email inbox should help you live and work better, but instead it often buries the important stuff and creates more stress than it relieves. Inbox, built by the Gmail team, keeps things organized and helps you get back to what matters.
• HIGHLIGHTS – Get the most important information without even opening the message. Check-in for flights, see shipping information for purchases, and view photos from friends right up front.
• BUNDLES – Similar messages are bundled together so you can deal with them all at once. And get rid of them with one swipe.
• REMINDERS – More than mail, you can add Reminders so your inbox contains all the things you need to get back to.
• SNOOZE – Snooze emails and Reminders to come back when you are ready to deal with them: next week, when you get home, or whenever you choose.
• SEARCH – Inbox helps you find exactly what you’re looking for— from your upcoming flight to a friend’s address— without having to dig through messages.
• WORKS WITH GMAIL – Inbox is built by the Gmail team, so all your messages from Gmail are here, along with the reliability and spam protection of Gmail. All of your messages are still in Gmail and always will be.
I’ve used Inbox for about a month now, and here’s what I’ve found:
Good News:
- Super easy to use. I have 2 usual responses to the emails I receive: “Not Now” or “Done” – which, on my phone, translates to “Swipe left” or “Swipe right”. The snooze function will remove the email from my Inbox until the time, or place, that I set it to appear, when I will be ready to handle it. Now I get to Inbox Zero every day!
- I use Bundles with a similar “Snooze” type function. Emails from certain senders are automatically grouped in bundles like “Social” or “Promos”, and I’ve set the app to only notify me of new messages in those bundles once a day, or once a week. Now, when I get a “New Email” alert on my phone (which happens less often now), I know it’s something I should look at.
- Bundles are also handy when processing all of the messages in my inbox at once. I can knock out all of the items in the “Promos” bundle quickly, then do a quick glance at the “Updates” bundle to see if there is anything I need to read before marking those as done too, leaving only the most important emails in my inbox for me to read and respond to.
- Highlights are nice. When I get an email that has an attachment or a link, I can see it without having to open the email at all. I received an email with a couple of YouTube links, and I could watch the videos right from my inbox.
- The new Quick-Response feature is useful on my phone. With a single tap, I can reply with a quick, automatically generated response like “Sounds good” or “See you then” and be done with it.
Bad News:
- No Calendar integration. When you receive an invitation or event email, GMail has a feature to add it to your calendar with a single click. Inbox does not have that.
- No Contacts integration. If you receive an email from a new address, GMail will let you add that person to your contact list. You can access the person’s contact info right from the email. Inbox does not have that either.
- Automatically Bundled Messages can be inconvenient sometimes. For example, I’ve reset my passwords or email address at some websites, and when they sent a confirmation email it didn’t show up in my inbox. That meant I had to either browse through all of the bundles to see where that confirmation was filed to, or open GMail and find the confirmation email at the top of the inbox there.
I haven’t found it to be that inconvenient to switch to GMail once or twice a week to handle those functions, so, over all, I’ve been happy with Inbox. If you’ve checked it out, I’d love to hear what you thought. Let me know in the comments section.
And if you’d like to check out my video course on “Detoxing your Inbox”, go HERE for a special discount. Some people have said it’s pretty good:
