- Move cursor to top-most email.
- Click.
- Read the email.
- Move cursor to the Archive button.
- Click.
- Repeat.
There is an easier way:
- Click on the top-most email.
- Read the email
- Press the '[' key on your keyboard to use Gmail's "Archive and Previous" command (use ']' to move in the other direction)
- Repeat steps 2 & 3 until you've cleared your inbox.
The time savings seems minimal, but let's add it up:
Point & click method, time per email: 2 sec (factoring in page load times)
Keyboard shortcut method, time per email: .5 sec
That's a savings of about 1.5 sec per email. Now, lets say we get 20 emails a day.
1.5 sec/email * 20 emails/day * 365 days/year = 10,950 sec/year
= 182.5 minutes/year
= ~3hr/year
Now let's assume that we've all got about 60 more years of emailing left in us, and that a radically faster alternative for archiving messages won't be developed in that time (unlikely, but I want to calculate these numbers so bear with my pointless hypothetical).
3hr/year * 60year/life = 180hr/life
180hr/life / 24hr/day = 7.5days/life
So while reading this blog post has probably taken 2 minutes, over the course of your life you now have an entire week to spend on things other than archiving your emails.
For a full listing of other time-saving Gmail keyboard commands, go here:
http://mail.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?answer=6594
Note to Google Apps Users:
You may find that the above shortcuts do not work for you. You need to go into your mail settings and enable keyboard shortcuts, they are turned off by default.
Note to Google Apps Users:
You may find that the above shortcuts do not work for you. You need to go into your mail settings and enable keyboard shortcuts, they are turned off by default.
