Organize your email! #1

When you are looking for an opportunity to work, and/or if you already applied to a few positions,  you will find yourself stuck with lots of webpages, emails and other contacts. 

So, it is time to: organize!

As you may know, I love to organize things, and there is actually one thing that I need to organize over and over: my email inbox.

I use gmail, and in my opinion, it is a good one for starters and it is really easy to organize. So, here are a few tips on how you can organize even better your gmail inbox:

• Labels:

- They are the best way to organize your email. I have 26 labels, including personal labels as "Friends&Co.", "Family", "Home", professional labels as "LinkedIn", "old-job-related", and other labels such as "Travels", "publicity", etc... To create a label, you just need to go to "Settings" --> "Create a new label", name it and voilà!

• Filters:

- After creating your labels, you should direct your emails to the corresponding labels. And that's when filters enter in this story: open the email that you want to label, select the small down-arrow in the up-right panel, and choose "Filter messages like this" --> "Create filter with this search" (in here, you will find the email address that will be labeled) --> "Apply the label" --> "Create filter".

- You can also add a label to a specific email, and for that you just need to open the email that you want to label and then click in the "label" sign that is presented in the upper menu. 

• Important/non-important mails:

- You can "teach" gmail what emails are important or not by selecting the arrow (´) that is immediately before the name of the sender in your inbox. Prioritize your emails is an important step towards organization! 

• Stars:

- You can star your emails, for instance, when it is something that you need to do during the day --> so you will not forget about it while it is starred.  

- I usually star my very important emails, either for professional or personal reasons.

• Mark as unread:

- Sometimes, after having starred an important email, I mark as unread to organize and prioritize even better my email inbox!

- I also try to clear my inbox as much as possible in a weekly basis: I only keep visible those emails that correspond to unfinished tasks, work, events. All the others are archived!