Gmail has a feature called Labs, which allows you to turn on various experimental features. One of those experimental features is called Send & Archive, which basically changes your Send button to a Send & Archive button. So when you reply to an email and hit that button, your reply is sent and the message is automatically archived. Not bad, right? It helps you clear stuff out of your inbox.

But there’s a better way.

The problem with Send & Archive is that it spits you back to your inbox after you send each message, meaning that you now have to decide which message to tackle next. And that encourages you to skim through all the email subjects again looking for the easiest or most appealing next one to deal with.

And let’s be honest here: what you’re actually doing is processing your email. You’re going to need to get through all of them anyway, so why not make that process as simple and straightforward as possible?

So instead of Send & Archive, I recommend that you turn on Gmail’s keyboard shortcuts on the General tab in Gmail’s settings, and get very comfortable with the ‘[’ and ‘]’ keys. These keys will archive the current message and immediately show you the previous or next message, depending on which one you press.

In practice this means you can start at either the first or last message in your inbox, read it, and reply if necessary (or not), but just press the appropriate of these two keys to archive that message and look at the next one. You can cruise right through your entire inbox without any time sitting there trying to decide which message you’re willing to tackle next.

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