So you want to work at a tech company?

You know why tech companies are cool? It’s not about the office. It’s about the fact that you get to try things, to learn to work smarter, move faster, and change for the better. That’s why I wanted to share one of the things that gets me excited.

Shortcuts. Or as some cliche-lovers call them, “hacks.” Now, do you have to be a super-savvy, setting-an-alarm-on-your-coffee-maker type to work at a tech company? No. But at a start-up, time is precious, so every little thing counts.

Note: This is part one of a three-part series where I highlight shortcuts to increase your efficiency across some of the common products we use. Truth is, most mature web products you use will have ways to work smarter, not harder.

At the end of this email, you should have the tools to spend far less time in your email, and be able to search and reference your previous threads at a lightning fast pace. So without further ado…

Shortcut 1: Labels and Filters

Gmail offers a lightweight way to group emails, called labels. It’s my preferred way for organizing things for later, and truth be told the first thing I did when I got my Simplifya email address was add labels. The great thing about labels is that not only can you nest them (have labels underneath labels), but you can add multiple labels to any email.

Adding labels is incredibly easy. Any time you select an email (or multiple emails), you have the ability in the top bar to add a label to it. Not only can you add your existing labels, but you can create a new one right there.

I like to group my emails by purpose/function (or in some case, like for newsletter, by the person delivering it. For example, I’ve got a label called “HR” where I keep anything related to my employment. I’ve got another one called “Website,” where I store conversations related to our marketing website. You can see more in the screenshot I’ve attached on the right.

Note: Labels become even more powerful when you archive emails. You know this little button in the toolbar:  . Archiving emails takes them out from the top of your inbox. For emails you need later but don’t want to let clutter your inbox, try labeling and archiving.

Shortcut 2: Filters

Another extremely cool thing Gmail gives you the ability to do is add filters to your emails. In other words, Gmail can take certain actions (like deleting it or adding a star to it) based on an email’s criteria. Here’s an example:

• I subscribe to the Marijuana Moment newsletter, which comes every. day. I don’t always read it.
• I find it useful so I don’t want to unsubscribe from it, but I also don’t want it clogging up my inbox and making it look fuller than it is.
• Using filters, I can add a label to every email that comes from Marijuana Moment, as well as mark it as read. Problem solved.

Filters and labels go hand-in-hand for me. One of my favorite usages is attaching a label via filters. I also use filters to archive emails that I don’t want to see at the top of my inbox but don’t want to delete. Slack sends emails like these, so does our web development tool, JIRA, and in fact, so does Simplifya.

Like adding labels, creating filters is also made very easy in Gmail, at least once you understand how to use them. In the new Gmail (which was released in the last couple weeks), you can just create a filter from any search you do in Gmail. Otherwise, you can access them in settings.

Shortcut 3: Advanced Search

Gmail offers what I’d best describe as advanced searchability. Meaning, the search bar can do a lot more than you might realize. I’m sure you’re used to typing a phrase into your Gmail to try and find some conversation you had three weeks ago (or longer). And hopefully that works sometimes, but there’s more you can do.

Like, did you know you can search only for emails that have attachments? Did you know you can use the search bar to only look at emails before or after a certain time?

Yeah, it’s powerful, and what takes it up another notch is you can do all of those things in one search. Here’s a few examples, and feel free to guess what these searches might do:

If you guessed: search number one is going to return emails from Rick using the word “import”, you’re right. And number two? Looking at emails from John that have attachments. Lastly, number three should return any emails on or after 4/20 this year with the label “Dev.”

Now it’s not always perfect (sometimes an email without an attachment will sneak into the search results of “has:attachment” for example), but if Google search helped you cut down your time in Gmail by 10 minutes a day, you’d gain 43 extra hours over the course of the year.

Shortcut 4: Canned responses

Less frequently used (and a little more niche) than the first three, Canned responses give you a way to store templates in your Gmail. One of the reasons I call it niche is because it’s not turned on automatically in Gmail. It’s a setting you have to turn on yourself. For those of you familiar with Gmail Labs, Canned Responses used to be one of those.

That said, turning on Canned Responses is easy. Just go to the “Advanced” tab in your Gmail settings.

And creating one is about as easy. You can create one from any email you’re composing. In fact, email draft window is where you control any and all canned responses. Which includes updating, saving and deleting Canned Responses.

Why would you use Canned Responses? Like I said, it’s niche enough that not everyone might have a reason to use them, but here are the reasons I use them and a couple additional ideas:

• Weekly emails (our weekly reports for example)
• Long(er) emails that are sent infrequently but don’t really change (I send the same email any time I create a new sales demo account)
• Call or meeting agendas

Bonus: Hot keys

I’ll fully admit from this point forward… I’m talking crazy.

The four shortcuts above are things I actively do in my own email, and for the last four or five months, I’ve done them more thoroughly and quickly than I ever had in my previous 15 years of using Gmail. And that’s all thanks to hot keys that allow me to take the various actions in my inbox without ever having to touch my mouse. That’s correct, just by typing keys (or combinations of keys), I can label an email, delete, star it, archive, or even mark them as read/unread.

I’ll stop here to say two things:

1. There are a lot of hot keys (see above screenshot), and I don’t pretend to use or remember them all. I mostly stick the most common ones I need, but at any time, you can use the hot key (“?”) to see the hot keys. Clever.
2. It was scary at first, mainly because of the idea that I could type a key and have something happen that I didn’t intend. The good news is this lessens over time and also there’s the “Undo” button.

Now like Canned Responses, you need to enable hot keys. They aren’t turned ON automatically in Gmail. You can do this in the “General” tab of your Gmail settings.

I hope you guys find this post useful enough to incorporate some of the above shortcuts into your daily habits. I don’t kid when I say a conservative estimation can save you upward of an hour a week. For those who are often in Gmail, it could be up to an hour a day.

And like most things, these are habits that need to be conscious at first, but will eventually become second nature. So get started and let me know if I can help you in any way.