There may be people in the world who are not distracted by a full email inbox, but I have never met one of them. Every single person I know is regularly consumed by email and very few inboxes ever get to zero. I know there is a whole movement of “Inbox Zero” fans out there, but the only way I ever get there is to simply select all my emails and hit the archive button. I do not think that serves as a legitimate time-saving hack, however. I do have one that I want to share with you today so you can compose Gmail from a near blank, distraction-free screen.
Since I live in Google’s web-based Gmail, I long ago went on the look for a way to avoid the crazy inbox. I tried building filters and labels so that my inbox would only be populated by the “important” emails. Alas, that did not truly work as Google started to help me with its algorithm by marking people I engage with regularly as “important.” Not a help, Google. Of course, you can “train Google” to not mark those messages as important, but that is another distraction.
Let me walk you through four simple steps on the way to composing email without going to your inbox.
Step One: From whatever web browser you prefer, you will want to make sure you are already signed in to your Google account.
Back in April, I shared this idea in my post: Speed Up Your Day With Google Chrome Secrets You Don’t Want To Miss. I explained it there, but received a few messages asking for more explanation, thus today’s post.
Step Two: Take this Compose Email link (right click and save link OR better, just click and hold the link and drag it to the address bar of a blank tab) and paste it into the address bar. This will open the “Compose Mail” process. You will see the typical items: From, To, and Subject. You can see the full URL in this screenshot below (in the address bar – mail.google.com/mail/yada yada).
The key thing to remember, and I put a big red arrow next to it for you, is that the TO: field is not correct. It reads: “Add Your Email Here” so that you will remember to change it to add the person you want to send your message. The beauty of this process is that you are actually within Google Gmail so if you start typing the name of a person who is already in your Google Contacts it will autofill that information.
Step Three: You can hit the Send button or wait a few seconds and Gmail will automatically save it as a draft. You can close the window and it will appear in your draft folder when you open the full Gmail window (with that full inbox you are trying to avoid).
Step Four: Bookmark this page and label it as Compose Email (or whatever you choose) and it will even have the little Google Gmail avatar icon. You do not have to bookmark it, but doing so will make it faster than trying to cut and paste each time.
There you have it – four steps to a distraction-free email experience within Gmail
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