(subtle electronic music) Do you know how to use filters and labels within Gmail? Even if you're only a novice, I'm going to show you three new ways so you can get the most out of your inbox.

Hello everyone, Scott Friesen here at Simpletivity, helping you to get more done and enjoy less stress. And in today's video, I want to show you how to automatically label certain emails, particularly if it's marketing, or perhaps newsletters that you subscribe to.

I also want to show you how to move emails from specific senders, so that they don't always show up in your inbox, and you can have a special location to review those emails. And last but not least, I want to show you how to build a to-do list queue right here within Gmail, especially if you find value in emailing yourself tasks or reminders, you can have your own queue to review those specific emails.

So let's start with our first tip,

Tip 1 Create a Filter

and we are going to automatically move most of our newsletters and marketing material out of our inbox into a specific label. Specifically, we're going to have this happen automatically as they arrive. So the first thing that we're going to need to do

is create a new label. To do that, we need to come down to the very bottom here on the left and select More, keep scrolling down and select Create new label, and here I'm going to add a new label called Newsletters. You can call it whatever you want.

I'm going to select newsletters because we're going to try and catch as many of these as possible. I'm going to select Create, and if we scroll back up there, you can see my Newsletters.

I'm going to click on these three dots and I'm going to change the color, just so it stands out a bit. I'm going to give it a blue label color. And if I select it, we haven't given anything this Newsletter label but that's going to change in a little while. Now that we have the label,

What we want to do is come up here to the search bar, select the "Show search options."

Now remember, this is our first step in creating a filter.

Yes, we could fill out some information here and just do a search on our existing email.

But we are going to create a filter that will be applied to future incoming messages.

And it's all going to start here with "has the words," and there's one word that I can almost guarantee all of your marketing material has within it, and that is the word "unsubscribe."

Whether you signed up yourself or, unfortunately, if someone sold your email address to someone else, I can almost guarantee that they're going to have an "unsubscribe" link or "unsubscribe" somewhere in the body of the email.

We're not looking at the subject here; we're looking at "has the words unsubscribe."

Now you can review the other information here as well, but this is really all I'm going to add for this particular filter.

Instead of hitting "Search," I'm going to select "Create filter."

Now on the next screen, or the next little window that we receive here, we get to decide what happens with that email.

So what we're going to do here is, number one, we're going to say "skip the inbox," in brackets, archive it.

Remember, that's very different from deleting it, we're just going to archive it, meaning it's going to not arrive; it's not going to start its life here in our inbox.

But there's a second thing that we want to do, and that is that we want to apply that "Newsletter" label.

So we're going to come down, here's all of our labels.

We're going to select "Newsletters."

So now what's going to happen, again, it's pretty straightforward.

Whenever an email arrives in my inbox, is sent to me, if it has the words "unsubscribe," it is going to get this label "Newsletters," and it's not going to show up in my inbox.

I'm going to say "Create filter."

Now you're actually not going to see anything happen live in the moment unless I happen to receive one of those emails in the next few seconds here.

If I click on "Newsletters," I'm still not going to see anything here because I didn't tell it to move all of my "unsubscribe" or marketing emails yet.

But going forward, starting right now, any new messages with "unsubscribe" are not going to appear here in my Inbox; they're going to appear here in "Newsletters," so I can go and review them when I want to.

And it's not going to clutter up all of my other information here in my inbox.

All right, let's take a look at a second one here.

And this next filter has to do with moving emails from a specific sender.

So, for example, maybe you want emails that are coming from a particular domain name, like a particular organization, for example.

Or maybe it's someone extra important, right?

It could be a boss, or it could be a client, something along those lines.

So what we're going to do to create this filter, again, we're going to come up here and select that down arrow, and we've got a few different choices that we can use here.

This time around, we're going to use the "From" field, and I'm just going to give you a couple of examples in this particular case.

So one of the things that I often...

Of course, I could put in a direct email address, I can put someone's specific email addresses, and I could separate them by a comma if I wanted to add a bunch.

But let's say that there was a particular domain that I wanted to be sent somewhere else, I wanted to filter it out somewhere else.

What I can do is I can use my asterisk as a wildcard and say "at," and then all you need to do is put in...

I'm just going to use "domain.com" as my example...

All you need to do is put in that domain.

So whether it's cnn.com, whether it's bestbuy.com, I mean, whatever makes sense to you.

Again, it could be your own organization or someone else.

You can put this, but anyone, again, it doesn't matter what the beginning of that email address is going to be.

It's going to catch everything here.

Now, what we can do is we can continue to fill up other pieces of information if we want to, and then go ahead and create that filter.

But there's something else that I wanted to add here as well.

What if you wanted to filter everything but a particular domain?

What if I wanted to say, you know what, let's go back to that unsubscribe example.

Let's say, I want to continue to filter out, or I want to tweak that previous filter that we had.

I want to filter out everything that has "unsubscribe."

However, I don't want to see if Simpletivity stuff gets through.

I'm hoping that you enjoy my weekly newsletter.

And so maybe you want to allow anything that's from @simpletivity to come through.

Well, all you need to do here is instead of just putting my email address, which would, of course, do that in this particular example, I'm going to put some brackets around it.

And what I'm going to do is put in front of it, I'm going to put the minus sign.

So what this is saying here...

Tip 3 Different Operators

Is that it is going to move everything that has "subscribe," anything that has "subscribe" in the body of the email will filter out as I continue through with this filter.

However, if it has simpletivity.com, if that's the domain name that it's coming from, because of the way that I've written this out with the minus sign in front, it is not going to apply to this particular domain.

So make sure that you understand that there are a number of different operators.

We could also use the OR operator if it has the words "unsubscribe," or another common one is "view in browser," for example, right?

In fact, we might want to use quotation marks for this, quotation marks, so it's looking for that phrase, because that's a very common one for newsletters, right?

Or maybe there's another word that you often see in a particular email.

So whether it's the minus sign, whether it's an asterisk, whether it's the OR operator, remember, you can make some fairly complex filters here, depending on your specific needs.

Now, the last one that I want to show you here today...

Tip 4 Create a ToDo List

has to do with creating a to-do list within your email.

Now, I don't necessarily recommend this from a productivity coaching or productivity consulting standpoint because I don't think your email is really the best place to keep a to-do list.

But yet I understand that we all work a little differently, and if you find great value in emailing yourself a to-do list or emailing yourself important emails or reminders, well, this may be helpful to you.

What we're going to need to do here is, again, we're going to create a new label.

So let's just quickly create a new label.

I'm going to just call this, let's just call this To Do List, make it nice and simple.

We'll come up here, here's our to-do list, should we give it a different color? Yeah, quickly, let's give it maybe an orange color there.

So we've got our to-do list label.

Next thing, what we need to do is create a new filter.

So if I come up here, let me clear out the information that we had here before in our previous example.

So we've got a blank slate here.

So what we want to be able to do is to move things, or to bring things into that to-do list that is coming from us.

So for example, I could go up here and say, well, I'm going to put anything from scott@sample.com, anything from this email address, I want it to move over here.

Now if I put in a comma, what I could do is I could add other email addresses as well.

Maybe it's my boss, maybe it's my wife, for example, I could put in other specific email addresses as well, so that it's more than just one specific one.

But in this example, I'm just going to use this dummy email scott@sample.com.

Next up, I'm going to say Create filter.

And then what I'm going to do is I'm going to say yes, once again, skip the inbox, I'm going to archive it and apply the To Do List label.

So just like we saw with the Newsletters, when anything comes from this email address, it's going to skip the inbox and go over here to my to-do list.

Now, of course, I don't have to have it skip the inbox.

If you think it's that important, and you don't want to miss out on it, well, maybe I would uncheck this and just say Apply this label, so I can quickly and easily see all of these orange labels.

You've got a lot of different options available to you here.

But in some cases, to keep a nice and clean inbox, sometimes it's nice to have things move directly over here to this label.

So I can say create that filter.

Now going forward, if I'm busy, if I'm somewhere away, and I just want to send myself a quick email, it's going to show up here, and I can review this when I want to.

And remember, just like these other labels, you can see the numbers beside them.

So you'll be able to see the number of unread emails that are waiting for you there as well.

I hope you enjoyed today's video, and I'd love to hear from you next.

Which of these three filters and labels combinations did you enjoy the most?

Which one are you thinking of applying to your own Gmail system or your own Gmail setup?

I would love to hear from you along with any other suggestions that you have right here for the Simpletivity channel.

Remember, being productive does not need to be difficult.

In fact, it's very simple.‍