GMail: Send and Archive – keep your Inbox tidy

Do you use GMail? If so, have you ever checked out the GMail Labs features, to be found under the little green beaker icon up in the right-hand corner? You should, as there are some great time-saving, productivity-increasing, visually-pleasing plugins to be found there. My personal favourite is 'Send and Archive'. Since activating it, my Inbox usually contains no more than about 10 messages and is sometimes even empty whereas it used to be piling over with 1000+ messages.

I don't adhere to any specific GTD method, but have developed my own system for e-mail management within GMail thanks to the Send and Archive plugin. Adding stars to e-mails that I need to follow up doesn't work for me for some reason. I simply don't 'see' them and don't click on the 'Starred' link in the navigation column often enough. My Inbox is the only place I always look, so what works best for me is making sure that I only have messages in my Inbox which require action from me (usually a reply, sometimes a task). The rest gets archived.

Basically, as the name suggests, Send and Archive sends your message to the recipient and then immediately archives the entire conversation, uncluttering in your Inbox. You can easily access archived mail messages in GMail, simply by clicking the All Mail link in the navigation column.

I used to Archive messages from my Inbox once every few months, in bulk. So there were always some messages that slipped through the net and got archived even though I'd never replied. Since using the Send and Archive plugin that rarely happens anymore as archiving has become something I do immediately, based on a message's status rather than a clean-up-inbox frenzy.