Gmail: Archive and Next

If you find yourself with a Gmail inbox a mile high, and want to power through it, you're probably doing the following:

1. Move cursor to top-most email.
2. Click.
3. Read the email.
4. Move cursor to the Archive button.
5. Click.
6. Repeat.

There is an easier way:

1. Click on the top-most email.
2. Read the email
3. Press the '[' key on your keyboard to use Gmail's "Archive and Previous" command (use ']' to move in the other direction)
4. 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.