How to Automate your Inbox with Gmail Filters

Dealing with email can be a real pain. Constantly having to sort through messages, assign labels, drag to the proper tab and send endless responses for the same type of message can really mess up your day. If you find yourself grinding away at your Gmail inbox wishing there was an easier way, you need to check out filters.

Using Gmail’s built-in filters you can automate your inbox to perform all sorts of tasks for you. You can forward messages from certain people to other accounts, apply labels to sort incoming messages and even reply to certain messages with canned responses. Though you have to take some time to set them up, once in place your filters will ensure your inbox is always just the way you like it. Check out this article on MakeTechEasier for more information.

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Reply to Gmail messages with stored responses.

Original Source – MakeTechEasier – 9 Ways to Make Better Use of Gmail Filters

Robert Kingsley is a former IT Support Engineer with a degree in computer networking. He left his desk job in 2011 to write full-time and has never looked back. You can check out more of his work on About.com where he is the Guide to Windows operating systems.

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How to Automate Your Job Search

It takes time, and a large amount of effort to find a job that will challenge you and help you develop in the way that helps your career, so there must be some ways to optimize this process to provide you with more options and more time. Well here’s a lifehack lesson written by Trevor Dobrygoski that will help you to automate your job search and save you time to focus on other high value job searching activities. This lesson helps you to create search patterns that will run automatically and will help you to identify potential jobs that will land in your email. It will also help you to quickly apply and respond to job correspondence. A monthly subscription to lifehack lessons will cost $4.99 and provides access to all previous lessons.

Here’s an excerpt from this lesson -

Looking for a job is hard work. Some would say job hunting is a full time all by itself. Even though searching for job can be a lot of work, there’s always ways to make things easier. One of the ways to make anything easier is to automate any part of the process that you can. One part of the job hunting process that I’ve always found to be the most difficult, is finding places that are hiring in your field.

To find potential job leads, you’re constantly looking at the same sites and performing very similar searches on sites like Google. A lot of this can be automated, and that’s what we’re going to show you here today. As a side note, this process is also ideal for anyone searching for freelance jobs such as writing.

The lesson is split up into different sections that gives you step by step instructions on how to configure Google Apps, Gmail, Google Alerts, Google Reader & Twitter, link up these tools to automate your job search.

Featured Photo Credit Fired Businessman via Shutterstock

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Automate Your Tasks, Simplify Your Life!

Task automaters are a class of software that can have a profound impact on your productivity. The magic behind these services is simplicity; you can design very sophisticated processes with just a few clicks of the mouse. One app having the ability to trigger a response in a second app opens the door to some very incredible productivity benefits. This video walks you through the basics of creating your very first automated tasks online, using IFTTT (If This Then That).

Check out Steve's weekly Podcast at www.dottotech.com Steve Dotto is one of Canada's most respected geeks. For over 15 years, as host and executive producer of Dotto Tech, a nationally syndicated TV show, Steve has entertained and educated millions of Canadians on all aspects of technology. Steve now hosts Dotto Tech as a weekly radio show and podcast. A very popular speaker, Steve is in demand addressing audiences on the changes technology is bringing to the workplace, and our society. Steve has one mission, to help us master our technology, at home, at school or at work, his message....we need to be in charge.

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To Automate or not to Automate Your Personal Productivity System

Robot photo via Shutterstock

This system can be just about anything that helps you get through your mountain of projects or tasks, and helps you get closer to your goals in life. Whether it’s paper or pixels, it doesn’t really matter. But, since you are reading Lifehack I have to assume that pixels and technological devices are an important part of your workflow.

A personal productivity system (at least the definition that this article will use) is a set of workflows and tools that allow an individual to optimally get their work done.

Workflows can be how you import and handle your photos from your camera, how you write and create blog posts, how you deploy compiled code to a server, etc.

Tools are the things like planners, todo managers, calendars, development environments, applications, etc.

You may be thinking that the more that we automate our systems, the more we will get done. This is mostly the case, but there is one very big “gotcha” when it comes to automation of anything.

Automation is a bad thing for your personal productivity system when you don’t inherently understand the process of something.

Let’s take paying your bills for example. This may seem very obvious, but if you can’t stick to a monthly budget and have trouble finding the money to make payments on time, then automating your bill payment every month is completely useless and can be dangerous for your personal finances.

Another example is using a productivity tool to “tell you” what tasks are important and what to do next. If you haven’t taken a step back and figured out just how your productivity systems should work together, this type of automation will likely keep you from getting things done.

You can only automate something in your personal productivity system that have managed for a while. If you try to automate things that aren’t managed well already, you will probably feel a bit out of control and have a greater sense of overwhelm.

Another thing to remember is that some things should always be done by yourself, like responding to important emails and communicating with others. Automating these things can show your coworkers and colleagues that you don’t care enough to communicate yourself.

On the other hand, automation is a great thing for your personal productivity system when you understand the process of something and can then automatically get the steps done. When you know how to manage something effectively and understand the step-by-step process of a portion of your system, it’s probably a great time to automate it.

I have several workflows that I have introduced in the last year that takes some of the “mindless” work from me so I can be more creative and not have to worry about the details of something.

On my Mac I use a combination of Automator workflows, TextExpander snippets, and now Keyboard Maestro shortcuts to do things like automatically touch-up photos imported from my iPhone 4S or open all the apps and websites needed for a weekly meeting to the forefront of my desktop by typing a few keys. Once you open yourself up to automating a few of your processes, you start to see other pieces of your system that can benefit from automation.

Once again; none of this works unless you understand your processes and know what tools you can use to get them done automatically.

If your workflow passes these three steps, then automate away, baby:

You can do this process in your sleep and it doesn’t require your full, if any form of attention. It can (and has been) managed in some form prior to automating it.The process is time consuming.The process doesn’t require “human finesse” (ie. communicating and responding to something personally)

Automating your personal productivity systems can be a great for you in the long run if you are careful and mindful of what you are doing. You first need to understand the processes that you are trying to automate before automating them though. Don’t get stuck in thinking that anything and everything should be automated in your life, because it probably shouldn’t.

Pick and choose these processes wisely and you’ll find the ones that take up most of your time to be the best ones to automate. What have you automated in your personal productivity system?

Chris is a developer, writer, tech enthusiast, and husband. He holds a degree in MIS and CMPSC from Penn State Behrend. Chris is also interested in personal productivity, creativity and how to use technology to get things done. Check out his writing at devburner.net or follow him on Twitter.

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