Specific Gmail filters for maintaining daily focus
As a product manager, I have to accept and process many inputs, so I need my tools to work with me — not against me. Gmail is one of the latter.
Email is a born noise machine. And despite being around for so many years, Gmail doesn't really help out much. So I've designed these filters that you can import to acheive the following:
- Mark unimportant stuff as read (so you're not distracted by badge counts)
- Move stuff out of your inbox into label-specific folders (so what's left in your inbox is truly-actionable)
When complete, basically all that's left in your inbox will be:
- "Real" email from "real" people
- Meeting invites
- Specific mentions within systems like Jira, Confluence, etc.
To import these filters into your own Gmail:
- Download mailFilters.xml to your local computer
- Log into Gmail
- On the top-right, click the settings (gear) icon, then click All Settings
- Navigate to the Filters and Blocked Addresses tab
- Scroll to the bottom
- Click the Import Filters link
- Click the Choose File button
- In the Finder dialog, select the mailFilters.xml file