Viewing your inbox quickly and picking out what's most important will help you get through it more faster.

Not all emails are equal. And treating them as such is a poor use of time. By switching to Gmail’s Priority Inbox, you only see what needs your attention most.

Hover over Inbox in your left-hand navigation bar and click on the down arrow that appears. From there, select Priority Inbox.

By default, your most important, starred, and unread emails will now be at the top of your inbox.

You can further customize how your priority inbox shows messages under settings (the Cog icon in the right-hand corner). Select Settings > Inbox and then edit the Inbox sections you want to see.

Moving back and forth between emails and your inbox can be a serious time suck when you're trying to power through them. Enable Gmail’s preview pane to read emails directly from your inbox.

Head to Settings > Advanced > Preview Pane and click Enable. (Don’t forget to Save changes at the bottom of the screen).

You’ll now see a three-line icon next to the cog in the top right-hand corner. This button lets you switch between a horizontal and vertical split (i.e. the email preview will show up either beside or below your inbox).

Lastly, you can also change how quickly an email viewed in the preview pane is marked as read under Settings > General > Preview Pane > Mark a conversation as read and select the time you want.

It’s all too easy to lose or miss important emails if they’re hidden on a different page of your Gmail inbox. And while you can’t get rid of Gmail’s pagination completely, you can change it to show up to 100 conversations at a time.

Click on Settings > General > Maximum page size and change it to Show 100 conversations per page.

Gmail’s keyboard shortcuts are incredibly powerful. But they’re also not activated by default.

To start, head to Settings > General > Keyboard Shortcuts, and make sure they’re enabled.

However, you’re not stuck with just the shortcuts Gmail suggests. If you’d like to customize your shortcuts, head to Settings > Advanced and enable Custom Keyboard Shortcuts.

Now, you can find out what key does what and customize them by heading to Keyboard Shortcuts in your top navigation bar.

Filters allow you to automatically categorize incoming emails to keep your Gmail inbox clear. By default, Gmail sorts messages into categories like primary, social, and promotions. But you can just as easily create custom filters based on criteria like sender, subject, or keyword.

Labels are Gmail’s way of categorizing your messages. They help you archive and find important messages, prioritize what needs to be done first, and get distracting messages out of your inbox.

Your navigation bar can get out of hand if you go on a label-making spree. You don’t always need every label visible, and cutting down what’s there can greatly reduce the visual clutter of your inbox.

This will make a big difference in the amount of visual clutter you see in your inbox.

Organization is key to optimization. So, if you feel the need to organize further, Gmail gives you 11 colorful ways to designate the importance of a message with stars.

Simply go to Settings > General > Stars and drag and drop the ones you want to use into the In use section.

To use stars, click on the empty star icon beside a message. Each click will rotate to the next star you’ve activated based on the order you selected.

Quickly seeing if an email was sent to a group or just to you can help you understand the intent of the sender and prioritize messages.

To turn on personal level indicators, head to Settings > General > Personal Level Indicators.

Once activated, the small markers beside your emails will show whether they were sent to only you, a group of people, or a mailing list. It's a great way to quickly parse what's in your inbox.

As you work through your inbox, you’ll no doubt have a few “This is important, but I don’t have time right now to answer it” moments.

If you’re anything like most people, it's easy to lose track of these emails. Luckily, Gmail now offers a few options for keeping track of them.

First, you can snooze emails by hovering over them in your inbox and clicking the clock icon. From there, you can choose a preselected or custom time for the email to return to your inbox.

How can you expect to get anything done when a little reminder keeps popping up telling you to check your email? This is a no-brainer. But one that few people actually do.

Head to Settings > General > Desktop Notifications and turn them off. (Seriously, turn them off!)

If you know you have a ton of emails to get through, it’s much easier to focus on them if you're not also trying to ignore the onslaught of incoming messages as well.

One way to do this is to use Gmail’s Offline mode. This allows you to access your inbox and write messages while offline (i.e. you won’t receive any new messages). Your messages will then be sent when you reconnect to the internet.

Alternatively, you can use an add-on like Boomerang, which allows you to “pause” your inbox.

Writing emails in Gmail isn’t the best experience. The window is small and there’s so much clutter that it’s easy to get distracted.

Click Compose and then select the full-screen button on the top right-hand corner of your email composition window. If you want to automatically start in full screen mode, you can make it your default by using the more button (triple dots) in the bottom corner.

Messaging templates can save you a ton of time, especially if you’re answering similar questions over and over.

First, activate canned responses under Settings > Advanced > Canned Responses.

Once enabled, you can save emails you've written as canned responses. Type a response or start a new email and then use the More button and select Canned Responses and New canned response… to name your response.

Next time you’re replying to a message, your canned responses will show up in the menu and can be added to the message with one click.

This is a small one, but something that can definitely be annoying for anyone sending a lot of emails. Rather than default to only reply to the sender, change your default to reply all.

Click on Settings > General > Default reply behavior > Reply all.

We all make silly mistakes when emailing. Did you forget the attachment? Make a typo? Use the wrong name? This small change gives you more time to fix your error.

Gmail now lets you undo sending emails, but defaults to just 3 seconds. To increase this, head to Settings > General > Undo Send and up the time to 20–30 seconds.

Archiving emails is a good habit to get into. Rather than deleting emails forever, archiving gives you a full, searchable history of your messages. But doing it manually can be annoying. Instead, you can add a send and archive button to your emails to automatically archive them after you’ve responded.

Go to Settings > General > Send and Archive and select Show “Send & archive” button. This won’t become a default behavior, but rather give you a new option when sending emails that looks like this:

If you’ve been emailing back and forth with someone to set up a date to meet/call/chat and want to create an event you can do that straight from your email.

There’s nothing worse than unsolicited emails clogging up your inbox. If someone continually emails you and doesn’t have an unsubscribe option, you can use Gmail’s block function to get them out of your face.

Being able to give out variants of your email address helps you filter your incoming email to focus on what matters.

Gmail ignores anything added after a + on your email. This gives you an easy way to create multiple versions of your email for use with different sources.

Let’s say a site requires you to subscribe to their newsletter in order to get a free trial. You can then provide them with youremail+newsletter@gmail.com, then create a filter that automatically archives any incoming messages going to that account.