Thinking in THreads

or how you and I learned to love Conversation View

We need to talk about conversation view - don't roll your eyes, don't go yet - because there are still way too many people who waste their time in Gmail reading too much, searching too much and looking over and over at the same information. There is good news: You will have a new power. You will love it.

Most people miss 1 or 2 key concepts to make conversation view work for them.

We are here to clear them up, once and for all, and enable new levels of Gmail productivity. Trust me, it doesn't hurt. If you are ready for a trial - it's two clicks to enable it.

First life-changing key concept: Your emails are really discussion threads.

E-mails used to be letters - that people fussed about, printed. Today they are more like instant messages, which by itself are meaningless. The conversation is important and has a beginning and an end.

CV makes you so productive, all major platforms copied it

Outlook: Introduced CV in 2010
Outlook for web introduced CV in 2013
Lotus Notes: Introduced CV in 2010
Apple Mail: Introduced CV in 2011

A normal conversation

You: Hey Holger, could you present this and that?

Me: Hey, sure. By when do you need it?

You: ASAP. Here are some attachments.

Me: You forgot the attachments.

You: Oh, here they are.

Me: Thanks. Presentation is ready.

You: Thanks!

The same conversation, but in an email thread

📧 Presentation idea

📧 Re: Presentation idea

📧 Re: Re: Presentation idea

📧 Re: Re: Re: Presentation idea

📧 Fwd: Re: Re: Presentation idea

📧 Re: Fwd: Re: Re: Presentation idea

📧 Re: Re: Fwd: Re: Re: Presentation idea

Conversation view equivalent:

Flat view equivalent:

When thinking about Gmail, think about different conversations on the web:

You post something (on a forum, on YouTube)
People add their 5 cents below and the discussion grows*
There's a list of discussions (or videos), with a number of unread comments
You can take action on those threads with all their comments, such as delete them, label them or mark them as "read".

*you would not believe how much trouble we got in the early days because Gmail would put your message above old content (so new content would sit on top of old) instead of the other way around.

Discussions are exactly what happens in Gmail. You start emails and as you get replies, the number next to the participant list grows. It is only ever one conversation though - it will take you a single click to archive the whole conversation, to label or file it - and you will not have to worry about all the emails contained. Everything will always stay together.

Second life-changing concept: The ellipsis (…) avoids repetition.

You already read a lot in your daily routine. All the productivity gurus are in your hair telling you not to touch an email twice. So how can reading the same text over and over be beneficial? Oh, it's two clicks to enable it in case you're ready.

Avoiding displaying emails twice

Let's start with the simplest case imaginable: You are replying to a single email. You click "reply" and compose your reply underneath the original email. In case you want to look up a detail in the previous email, you look up while writing.

When looking at the picture to the right, what will clicking the ellipsis button reveal? The entire previous email you are replying to. Compare the two images on the right.

It does not make a difference if you click the ellipsis or not. The ellipsis is only displayed to you, to read less repeating text.

Original email included in your reply, but displayed collapsed. Nice and tidy - or do you prefer repetition?

Now you recognize that you are seeing everything there is to see about this conversation at once glance. No scrolling, no repetition, no 6-level indentation necessary.

You recognize that you can click on any of those six emails that were sent before this latest reply, and would get more details on that email. If you did that, every email would have a friendly ellipsis button for you to see every comma that was included in that email.

Ellipsis does not hide indentation, but repetition

A common misconception is that the ellipsis simply hides text the sender replied to. So that everybody would get "my text" but would have to click to see "the other guys' text".

This is not how Gmail works! Gmail compares the previous email in the conversation that you received and hides anything repeated. It also doesn't change the email, it is a convenience function of the email reader.

At any point, you can use the friendly ellipsis to check if you really haven't missed a beat.

Conversation mode power tips

and still two clicks to enable it to give it a try. Ready when you are.

Replying to a previous email

You can reply (or forward) to any email, not necessarily to the latest one, by clicking its "reply" button.

A word of caution: This feature invites confusion for you and others, as your emails will be sorted chronologically within the same group (it will not create a visual tree structure). In other words, your reply will be displayed all the way down.

Consider changing the subject to create a new conversation (see below).

Delete single emails out of a conversation

When emails are grouped into conversations, common actions (label, archive, delete) concern the entire conversation. While we are not big deleters on this blog - if you just want to delete a single message, you can do so like this:

Create a new conversation = change subject

"Oh, I know this is unrelated, but could you also..." Urgh!!

Don't be that person. Let us keep one topic per conversation. That way, we can archive it when done and avoid needlessly copying people without hurting egos.

Here is how you can change the subject of a conversation, so that you can retain the history but will start a new conversation. If you change the subject, your email will NOT be included in the old conversation but start a separate one.

You can also use this tip if somebody else started going on a tangent. Your colleagues will thank you.

"When searching, I can't find anything."

Gmail always gives you a list of threads (or emails) as a search result. You may get what you were searching for from the email list alone, or you may need to examine the emails that were returned. In that case, Conversation View may feel overwhelming - but Gmail will actually expand the individual emails that matched the search and highlight search terms.

"I never know which email is new"

When you open a thread, Gmail will always expand new emails and collapse old ones - because you have already read them. There is a new feature that will insert a "New" bubble next to new emails to make them stand out further. This will work only the first time you open the email though. But, being a GTD ninja, you read emails once anyway to get to inbox zero, right?

With that - I hope you give it a try. Gmail the way it is meant to be! I dare you to keep it enabled for two weeks, you will very probably not want to go back. When you do accept my dare, please let me know how it goes and drop me an email! Thanks for reading!

#gmailPublished 2018-07-23 by Holger Matthies.Modified 2020-08-11 by Holger Matthies.

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