Mid April some channels on YouTube were making mention of some of the changes that were coming to Gmail. This was such exciting news. As someone who has an Android phone – I have been using Inbox by Gmail for a while. It has such great features, but it wasn’t available for my work email – that when I heard some of these features where going to be implemented on G Suite for Education platform – I was dying to see the finished product.
We rolled it out just before the long April weekend (in South Africa) about the 25th of April and me and our IT intern at work tested it for a couple of days before giving staff the option of using it.
It is fantastic for some of the following reasons:
- Snooze Function
- Calendar, Keep and Task Integration
- Left Sidebar
- Google suggested answers (Smart Replies)
- Attachments
Snooze Function.
The ability to snooze an email until a later date and time. There is even the option of selecting “some day”. You are not even required to open your email to select the snooze option.
Also if you have snoozed an email and do want to access it for some reason – on the left navigation pane – you can select snooze, and all your snoozed email will appear.
Calendar , keep and tasks Integration
The ability to have your calendar open while still in Gmail. You can open emails and look for specific dates at the same time! Keep has been integrated successfully in other Google products such as Docs and Slides. Now having them open in Gmail is fantastic – as Keep is of the products I use every day to remind me to do things.
Left Sidebar
You can hide the left sidebar. Click on the hamburger stack icon. This is so useful as there are times you need more screen space for an email.
Click here to view a short Video [This is a video from The Verge – one of the tech channels I subscribe to on Youtube.]
Google Suggested Answers (Smart Replies)
Googles smart replies has been around for a while on the android version of Gmail. This option gives three suggestions for the user. It is an Artificial Intelligence (AI) feature that suggests options after analysing how the user usually responds to email.
Attachments
You are now able to open attachments without needing to open the email. It is also great to note that you can easily see the names of the attachments, which is useful to see exactly what you are looking for.
NOTE:
If the snooze feature is not working (greyed out) there is a way to fix it:
You have probably turned off email conversations feature in Gmail. You must enable this to be able to use snooze. (Found in Settings)
If you don’t like the new Gmail – you can still go back to the classic Gmail (but why would you?)
You can also download Tasks as an App on to your Android / Apple smart phone – I recently discovered tasks. Its been around for a long time, but recently it just seemed a logical progression to improving my productivity.
Have a lovely weekend.
EDTECH WITH @CHE_MARNIE 