Wednesday, 1 September 2010

Google Priority Inbox

Information overload is a reality of the modern workplace. The average corporate worker sends and receives more than 150 messages per day, an email deluge of varying importance: key project updates from colleagues, requests from higher-ups, appointment reminders, and automated mail that’s often much less important. With so much information to process, simply figuring out what needs to be be read and what needs a reply takes up a lot of time. Google have recently launhed Priority Inbox Beta in Gmail, an experimental new way of reducing information overload.

Priority Inbox is a new view of your inbox that automatically helps you focus on your most important messages. Gmail has always kept spam messages out of your inbox, and now Google have improved Gmail’s filter to help you see the emails that matter faster without requiring you to set up complex rules.


Here’s how it works: Priority Inbox splits your inbox into three sections: “Important and unread,” “Starred,” and “Everything else”:


Messages are automatically categorszed as they arrive in your inbox. Gmail uses a variety of signals to predict which messages are important, including the people you email most and which messages you open and reply to (these are likely more important than the ones you skip over). And as you use Gmail, it will get better. You can improve the ranking in Priority Inbox by clicking the buttons at the top of the inbox to mark conversations as important or not important.

As a result, your inbox is better organised, and you can spend your time addressing your most important emails right away.