Optimize Your Emailing with Keyboard Shortcuts
Many of us spend a good portion of our days dealing with email. Whether we relish or loathe the task, we can all agree that it makes sense to figure out how to do go through your inbox as efficiently as possible. We’ve looked at ways of optimizing your Gmail account, but today we’re looking at something a bit more basic: The keyboard shortcut.
Every on and offline mail service (Gmail, Yahoo, Hotmail, Outlook, Apple Mail etc.) has them, but many of us don’t use them. Just like when you discovered ctrl/Apple + c, v and x (you have discovered those, right?), a little know how can result in a ton of time saved over the years.
Rather than cover every mail service, we’re going to give a few keyboard shortcuts for Gmail, which is still the mail service of choice for the majority of us. (We’ve put links to other mail services below).
- Enable keyboard shortcuts on Gmail by going to settings (the little gear in upper right corner). On the “General” tab, scroll down to “Keyboard shortcuts”. Turn keyboard shortcuts on and save settings at bottom of screen.
- Shift + c to compose message in new window.
- / puts your cursor in search box. This is especially useful for those of us who keep documents in our inbox.
- Shift + c to reply. Shift + a to reply all.
- Shift + 3 to delete a message.
- gi Takes you to your inbox.
- ? shows a keyboard shortcut cheatsheet.
- Yahoo, Hotmail, AOL, Outlook, Apple Mail (may vary between OS versions).
We like to say that the hours of our days are often lost in teaspoons, not gallons. While not revolutionary for many of us, sometimes mini timesavers like these keyboard shortcuts help us do the things we’re doing faster so we can get on to more important things.
What simple but important email timesavers do you use? Let us know in our comments section.
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