We ended last week with me starting to mention the right-side menu in the new Google Gmail interface. It contains the Calendar, Keep and Tasks (also, a small “+” icon). It makes it much easier to get to all three items. When you click one of them they open in a side menu and you have full access to the app. When you hover the plus at the bottom of the items it says, “Get Add-ons.” Click it if you want to take a look; however, my experience was they both needed a small payment to continue using them. Needless to say, I chose not to pay for something that was really not a necessity.
Another useful feature or two can be found when you hover your mouse pointer over an email in the Inbox. On the left are two items that were there before: a box and a star. They respectively allow you to select the email or mark it as important. The new ones on the right are Archive, Delete, Mark as read/Mark as unread, and Snooze. The first three are standard in many programs but I will tell you about archiving email. Most people do not know about or use archiving. It can be used in lieu of deleting an email and still kept for later use. When you archive an email it will be removed from your Inbox and put it in your “All Mail” folder. I do not use archiving as, in my opinion, it is just a conglomerate of all your emails with those you have archived. It makes it hard to find them again. I prefer to create a new label in Gmail (folder) and put things I need later there. But now Snooze is here.
Snooze allows you to choose how long you want to ignore an email. Once you pick a new day/time the email will vanish from your Inbox. On the day/time you picked it will pop back into the top of your email list for you to work on it at a later time. I really like this as sometimes I do not have time to work on something when I get an email. Now I can snooze it and it will remind me at a later time when I can work on it. Yes, I could remember or set up a task but this just makes it easier.
One last feature today is “Nudge.” A nudge automatically adds a yellow label to an email if you haven’t replied or heard back from an existing reply. Again, not horribly necessary but very convenient when your day is full of many emails and appointments.
There are a couple of other neat features so poke around in the app. However, I do want to mention one last new feature which is slightly harder to get to. It is called “Smart Composer.” We will be looking into “Smart Composer” which is another of my favorite parts of the new GUI next week. It may amaze you…or just be blah. The choice is yours!
