Good Housekeeping habits for your Gmail Inbox

I love Simone Smith (her profile is here). She comes up with lots of good ideas. And this week, her weekend housekeeping (read it in her forum here) activity gave us another inspirational topic to write about! Many hubbers have come up with many exiting and good tips, with ideas as varied as: Green cleaning laundry to household cleaning under a budget to organic cleaning.

All of them are interesting and can be put into use effectively in a household.

Everyone is talking about good housekeeping habits. Should those good habits be limited to your closet, or bathroom or kitchen? Well, shouldn’t you develop good housekeeping habits for your other homes – like your INBOX, your FACEBOOK, your TWITTER, your DESKTOP or your LAPTOP?

Here are some useful quick tips for all some of these...

I am sure many of you will be having chocking INBOX. When I first got my Gmail, there were not many emails then. Now there is flood of emails hitting my INBOX. One day I sat through to clean my inbox. After reading several tips and tweaking my imagination, I developed a habit of keeping my inbox clean (read: empty). Here I am sharing a few housekeeping habits to keep your Gmail Inbox clean.

Check your old email first. After logging into Gmail, one checks new email! Often that is the reason why one has logged in. DO NOT CHECK YOUR NEW EMAIL. First pay attention to emails which you have been postponing for quite some time.

If an email needs some action or a reply later, then move the email to ‘action’ label (you can create label, name it “action”). Before labelling it to Action, make a note in to-do-list.

If an email is lengthy and can be read later, move to ‘read later’ label. During your free time, you can go to this label, and read through the emails.

Rest of the email in your inbox, and emails you have already responded can be archived. No additional labels are required. Gmail is good enough to search any email should need to find a particular email.

You can immediately trash any friendly email forwards or junk emails. Don’t spend much time on those junks...

Read; take a decision and dispose of your email, one at time. Open one email at a time, and take a call on what to do with that email. As explained above, you have only three options, label it “action”, or “read later” or archive.

Second most important tip is to keep very few labels (or folders). You can create labels easily in Gmail. Don’t create too many. In fact, I would suggest creating just two: (1) Action & (2) Read Later.

A CLEAN, empty INBOX can very refreshing.

A cluster free Facebook is like to clean and well kept home... I found a useful article on this subject at Mashable blog http://mashable.com/2010/04/08/clean-up-facebook/. [The tips were written for old interface of the facebook, still can be applied to new version of the facebook]

Here are summary of some tips:

Organize your friends list. The first rule to keep your facebook clean will be to organize your friends list as Close Friends, Family, Co-workers, Acquaintances and All Others!

Do not have too many lists (like Gmail labels). All unknown friends or unreal friends should be listed in All Others list. In above blog, there is another link on how to ‘create and manage friends in facebook’, follow the link for great tips on managing friends.

Another untidy culprit is the News Feed. Many people don’t know that you can HIDE or SHOW news feed. Go to Edit Option and manage whose news feed you want to hide or show. This way, you can control the flow of news feeds on the front page of the facebook.

The third culprit is apps. Over time you might have authorized a huge list of application on the facebook. The list will be large enough to surprise you. Check and manage the apps in Accounts – Application Settings. Here you can disable apps that you no longer want. Believe me; you will delete most of them.

That’s all folks for now. For good housekeeping your desktop or laptop would require a separate hubpage. So watch out this space for the same.

If you have some more housekeeping tips for Gmail or Facebook, leave them at the comments section at the end of this hubpage.