Gmail Priority Inbox

If you haven't tried Gmail's Priority Inbox, you owe it to yourself to at least check it out.

Tuesday, I was teaching a session at the NCEAFCS meeting and the instructions I gave for how to get to the priority inbox have changed the next day.

To see the Priority Inbox from your Gmail account, pause your pointer over "Inbox" at the top of the left navigation list, then click on the drop down menu button (small triangle) and select "Priority Inbox" at the bottom of the list.

This separates your mail into 3 sections.  "Unread and Important messages", "Starred messages" and "Everything else".

Gmail will identify which messages are important based on who it is from, the content of the message and messages you've marked as important.  You can 'train' Gmail to do a better job of recognizing what YOU consider important by correcting it anytime it mislabels a message (click on the important or unimportant buttons when reading a message).

My favorite aspect of this feature is keeping the starred messages separate.  I star messages by clicking on the star icon in the top left corner of the message or at the far left of the message list for messages that I need to act on.  This way, I don't lose those messages in the river of unimportant email.

I keep a close watch on the 'important and unread' section and try to keep it down to a manageable size (less than a dozen or so messages by either starring the message to be worked on later, archiving, deleting or moving it to a label. 

If I find a message that should have been flagged as important in the 'everything else' section, I mark it as important.  I read through these messages when I have time.  If they move onto the next page, I don't worry about it too much. 

Give the Priority Inbox a try for a couple days and see if it doesn't help you.