The quartet system to keep your gmail clutter free.

How often do you open your Gmail, only to feel overwhelmed by the mix of junk and important items in your inbox? Everything is cluttered together in one single place, whether it's marketing newsletters, LinkedIn job alerts, interesting articles from Hashnode, or even prospects from the new online dating website you just joined.

I will share with you a simple method I use to keep my inbox clutter-free and organized, allowing me to keep track of what is important and what is junk. It all begins with one straightforward philosophy—a philosophy that 99% of Gmail users don't care about. That is, "Your Inbox is meant to be kept empty."

Yes! Your inbox is not a folder where you should store all your incoming items indefinitely. Instead, it serves as a temporary stop for your incoming emails, where they can reside until you either move them to another location or permanently delete them. By the end of the day, your inbox should be empty once again.

Now, let's explore how to implement this system.

Step 1: Clear your inbox

This step can be a bit tedious. You need to identify all the important emails you want to keep and delete the rest.

Select all the emails by ticking the checkbox at the top of your inbox.

Find out what is important for you and uncheck it. Delete the rest.

Step 2: Unsubscribe from marketing emails

Visit Unroll.me, an excellent app for managing your email subscriptions. Sign up and connect your Gmail account. Now, you can choose the email services or newsletters you wish to unsubscribe from.

Step 3: Create Labels.

Now comes the interesting part. We will divide all our emails into four distinct categories.

1. To Read: Content you'd like to save for future reading, such as newsletters, changelogs for a library, article digests, etc.

2. Actions: These are the emails you need to save for later to act upon. They can be emails from your boss, a new hackathon alert, etc.

3. Waiting for Response: These are the emails you sent and are awaiting a reply from the recipient. If they don't respond on time, you need to follow up with them.

4. Interesting & Important: These are the things you found interesting and want to save.

Let's create labels for all of these categories.

You should also assign color codes to these labels based on their priority. Use a vibrant color for crucial categories and a muted color for those of lesser importance.

Step 4: Assign labels to emails and create multiple inboxes.

It's time to assign these labels to all the remaining emails in your inbox. Take your time and think carefully about which label best suits a specific email.

Alright! We have created four labels to categorize our entire inbox. However, the inbox still isn't empty. To clear our main inbox, we need to create three additional inboxes for three of the four labels we just created. We are not creating an inbox for the "Interesting & Important" label, as it is meant to save items indefinitely without requiring any actions.

To create multiple inboxes, Click on the settings Icon at the top right corner of your Gmail interface, scroll down and click on multiple inboxes under the "Inbox type" menu.

In the settings panel, add three inboxes like this:

Here, we are setting up three inboxes for our labels. The label:To Read simply informs Gmail which label to use as the filter for a specific inbox. The next step is to determine the position of these inboxes. For better clarity, select "Right of the inbox."

Save your changes and voila! You now have one primary inbox and three categorised inboxes.

Now that all your emails are sorted into one of the categorized inboxes, you can select all the emails in your main inbox and archive them. This will clear your main inbox but you will still be able to see your emails in the other inboxes.

Step 5: Maintaining this system.

Maintaining an organized inbox is not just a one-time activity, but a regular task necessary for a peaceful and productive day. Now that you have labels to clearly define the purpose of each e-mail, when a new email arrives in your inbox, you have a few options:

1. If it is from a marketing service you no longer wish to receive notifications from, go ahead and unsubscribe from their email list and delete (not archive) the email.

2. If you want to save the email, assign a suitable label to it and archive it from your main inbox. This will keep your inbox empty.

3. After you have finished reading or taking any action on the email, remove the label from it. By doing so, it will also be removed from its respective inbox.

Performing these steps daily will keep all your inboxes clean, allowing you to enjoy a peaceful, uncluttered, and productive day.

Follow me on twitter to stay in touch. You can find my writings at devshekhawat.com. Also, subscribe to the newsletter here to get daily updates on 💻 web development, ☀️ life and 📚 productivity.