The Inbox app is Google's vision of future of emails. There are many articles can be found explaining its features and why it is such an amazing app. However, here are some tips on how to use those features to make Inbox your personal productivity hub.
Before going any further, the key features of Inbox over any other email apps are
1. Pin emails 2. Sweep emails and reminders 3. Ability to create reminders 4. Ability to snooze emails and reminders 5. Mark emails and reminders done or archive 6. Email bundles 7. Ability to create custom bundles 8. Smart Search
Any one's personal productive requirement comes under the following groups
Communications In the core, Inbox is an email app. It will fetch your emails and let you send one as well. The bundle feature, which will group similar emails together in bundles called Upates, Social, Finance, Forums and Promos etc. will help you manage and prioritize your incoming emails more efficiently. The best way to achieve that is to assign a custom time schedule for each bundles to show up on your inbox. For example, Updates bundle can be made to show you every day at a particular time, while less important ones such as Forums and Promos could be scheduled weekly instead. The ability to pin your emails is similar to like flagging or starring in other emails. However, as the pinned emails stay on top of your inbox, you can sweep rest of the emails to either delete or archive achieving inbox zero.
Reminders Inbox display your Google Now reminders as well as the ones from Google Keep at one place. You can easily add recurring reminders also based on location or time, and one could turn any emails into reminders as well. The snooze feature on the reminder allows you to have manage reminders efficiently or even implement structured procrastination. You can go through all your snoozed and upcoming reminders in the reminders and snoozed tab sorted by time. Importantly Inbox gives you smart predictions when you create reminders, such as adding phone numbers or address, making them easily executable.
Weekly/ Daily review The cornerstone of any productivity system is the ability to review your tasks on a weekly or daily basis. The snooze feature in Inbox is designed in a way that you can easily schedule them to time of day or week. You can schedule your bundles to show up on the same time as well giving you a proper review of you emails and tasks.
News and Blog Posts Instead of using a news aggregator apps you can actually subscribe the news from any of the trusted news sites by going to their website. This will deliver news summary to your inbox as emails every day. By building a custom News bundle it can be scheduled to show up on every morning, thus getting your news at the right time. Same can be applied to blogs as well, however it will be more advantageous to make the Blog bundle show up only on weekends.
Calendar In Google calendar, you can set it to send you a daily agenda as email at a particular time of the day. By setting syncing the time schedules of News bundle and calendar agenda, one could get a very personalized and effortless experience to start the day.
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