Working smarter not harder: Organising your online life - Gmail and Drive

Filters and Labels for your mail

Labels are like folders, but you can add more than one label to a message. To add a label to an email, select the email, then click Labels Label. The label will be shown next to the email.

- In label list>show if unread

Filters Filtering emails in Gmail allows you to redirect emails as they arrive, thereby saving the trouble of having to sort and manage some messages manually. For instance, you might want to direct all emails from parents to a folder designated specifically for "parents", or staff emails to a folder for staff. Filtering in Gmail is also good for forwarding specific emails, applying the same filter to several senders, designate label colours for better organisation or mark certain emails with importance markers.

Check out the categories in your inbox

Your emails are automatically organised into tabs. For example, an email from a google doc can be found in the "updates" tab.

Learn more about inbox categories.

Contacts

Manage your contacts - create contacts lists

Undo sending a message

Turn on Undo Send to get extra time to look at an email before it gets delivered.

Learn more about sending & unsending emails.

Labs

Use Labs to turn on more features

e.g. Undo send

Searching within Gmail

Find unread messages:

Type "is:unread" (not including the quotation marks) in the Gmail search field. Click the search button (sporting a magnifying glass, 🔍). You can also press Enter, of course.

If you do this search repeatedly or generally appreciate brevity, you can use "l:unread" or even "l:^u" instead of "is:unread" (or "label:unread"). You can also combine the quest for unread messages with others: "l:^u from:tim" finds all unread messages from "tim", "l:^u l:^t" finds all unread starred mail, and "l:^u l:^k subject:hi" finds all unread messages with "hi" in the subject that are in the Trash.

Further search terms

Google Drive

Folders

- colour coded to easily categorise (right click>change colour)
- share whole folders
- move to
- add star

Team Drives

Google Team Drives are shared spaces where teams can easily store, search, and access their files anywhere, from any device.

Unlike files in My Drive, files in Team Drive belong to the team instead of an individual. Even if members leave, the files stay exactly where they are so your team can continue to share information and get work done.

Linc-Ed and Team Drives

Linc-Ed are working on the API (a set of functions and procedures that allow the creation of applications which access the features or data of an operating system, application, or other services) to be able to talk to each other.  Currently, we have a shared folder for any documents we want to embed on Linc-Ed (e.g. intervention docs, writing progressions).

Have a play around...