4 Ways to use Gmail For Business Productivity

Many people use Gmail for personal use, but people use Gmail for business as well for a number of reasons. Using Gmail for business provides companies with a tool that allows employees to communicate in an effective and efficient manner. In fact, you can use Gmail to help increase business productivity as well. The following are 4 ways to use Gmail for business productivity:

• Pre-Filter Incoming Messages

  The use of Gmail Filters allows you to sort and organize your inbox to help manage incoming messages. This allows you to automatically label certain emails, archive certain emails, delete certain emails, forward certain emails, star certain emails or even keep certain emails out of your spam folder. This helps safe you a lot of time when it comes to looking through your inbox in order to organize everything manually. Creating a filter is easy. Simply use the search box and then click on the “Create a filter with this search” option at the bottom of the search window (click down arrow by search ). One of the advantages filtering your inbox provides is that you can use the “Skip the Inbox(Archive it)” option and “Apply the label” option to remove new emails from your inbox automatically and store them in a separate folder that you can look through at a later time.
   

• Integrate Hangouts for Work

  Integrated Hangouts is a great way for employees to speak with one another as well as work with each other in a group setting. This prevents the need to go find a space where everyone can meet and helps streamline the group work process. Hangout can be used to send voice messages to one another as well as start video conferences together with up to 10 people. Hangouts simply makes it much easier for people to work with one another on company projects, helping make the process less time consuming and more efficient. It also allows employees to work with one another outside of the office, thereby helping to reduce miscommunication issues.
   

• Save Attachments to Google Drive

  Google Drive lets you save all of your files in one place where you can easily and instantly share files with others. When someone sends you an email that contains an attachment, you can even download that attachment straight to your Google Drive. Why is this so helpful? If you are away from the office and someone needs a file or wants you to take a look at something, you can easily pull the file up through Google Drive on your smart phone or tablet.
   

• Being a Smart Star in Gmail

  This incredibly simple but unbelievably useful tool basically allows you to add a star icon to your emails to help you sort through your inbox quickly. For example, you can add a yellow star to messages that you need to reply to later and red stars to messages that need to be replied to immediately. You can also add stars to certain email addresses so that when you look through the new emails in your inbox you’ll know which ones are a priority to get to. The star icon is a simple but incredibly effective method to help you prioritize your emails. Using the star icon is easy – just click the star icon beside the sender’s name in the inbox or click the star icon at the right corner of a message, beside the time. Click the icon repeatedly to choose the type of star you want to use.

These are four reasons why you should make sure to use Gmail for business productivity.