Snooze as an operating system

Gmail lets you snooze emails - temporarily suspend an email. Like your alarm clock in the morning, it will come back to your inbox. That opens the door to all sorts of innovative uses.

But! Just like your alarm clock in the morning, tapping "snooze" costs you time. That little bit of instantaneous relief means you have to deal with the problem later again. So here is an in-depth look at snooze and how you can use it to your advantage - without getting addicted to it.

That was yesterday.

How it's done

In case you haven't used it: Right-click any email, anywhere, and select "Snooze". You can also mass-snooze.

You can unsnooze (that's a verb now) the message at any time.

Snoozing has 2 distinct benefits

1: Emails come back after the snooze timer expires

The main functionality of snoozing is taking your email out of your inbox (which is nothing more than removing the "inbox" label) and adding a "snoozed" label so you can find it under "snoozed".

When the time comes, the process is reversed and the email pops back into your inbox (with a little "snoozed 10 hours ago" indication).

2: Emails come back immediately when new emails arrive

This may not be obvious, but this is how snoozing is different from muting. When you snooze a conversation, any reply to that conversation immediately "unsnoozes" the conversation. This way, you can be sure that you do not miss a beat in the conversation. Obviously, if you have disabled conversation view, this does not apply to you.

Yet another reason to enable conversation view, in case you needed one.

If you would like the email to stay put - mute the email instead (found under the "three dot" menu - muting is permanent until you unmute, though).

Great use cases

Snoozing dramatically increases your options and can turn your Gmail inbox into a task manager.

Schedule work

Depending on your way of working, Fridays may be the day for you to treat all your invoicing emails. Or the upcoming travel time may be precisely when you need these emails.

There are other ways to refer to emails in the future: Any service can hold a URL to any email in Gmail so you can easily get back to it. You can paste it in your calendar event, for example.

Zoning: Sending emails into time zones

My meetings usually end 5pm Eastern. There are certain emails (low-priority items such as newsletters etc.) which I snooze into this window.

Another window you might use is the mornings or Friday afternoons.

Cleaning out your inbox

I'm torn about recommending this. Experience says that you should touch emails as little as possible - snoozing is the opposite.

However, if you are on a roll emptying your inbox, determined to get to zero, snoozing may be a way to circumvent emails that would throw you off.

Incubation

Is there something you need to reply to within 24 hours, but need to think about? Or have commited to replying by Wednesday - but just need to leave marinating in your mind? Snoozing can work like setting yourself reminders.

Reply-by (unless somebody else replies)

Know those emails where many people are addressed and somebody needs to answer? Snoozing this email makes sure that you get to this email in due time unless somebody replies first. This is not a game of passive-aggressive sit-it-out, but rather letting the most competent person person reply (without the dreaded "hey, have you seen Bob's email...?").

Follow-up

You can snooze an email you have already sent. It will also pop back into your inbox - that way, you can track if you are expecting an email in, say, 2 weeks.

Anti patterns

In software engineering, we have patterns (best practices or laudable templates you should try to repeat) and anti-patterns (things many people unfortunately end up doing). For Snoozing, it usually plays out like this:

Snoozing forever

I have seen people snooze emails for a year. There is honestly no reason to do this, you will just clutter up your Snoozed view.

Better: Archive those emails, that what the archive is for. Any new email in the conversation will bring the conversation back.

Snoozing everything

Snoozing should be done purposefully - there should be a reason why you snooze a single email. Not because it isn't useful now, but because it will be useful by the time it becomes active.

Never snooze "away from". Always snooze "toward".

That applies to many things in live, I should get that framed.

Rolling over

If you find yourself snoozing something that was snoozed - that's a procrastination warning sign.

You should probably take a minute and deal with the matter (even if that means putting it on a "someday when I am in the mood" list). Chance is, "dealing with it" will require as little as calling a meeting or asking a question.

The elegant snooze dialogue on mobile

🤓 The nerd box

The shortcut for snoozing is b. You need to enable shortcuts for this.
Snoozing works with or without conversation view. That was not always the case.
Snoozing works on mobile. It also looks much better there.
The options available for snoozing ("on the weekend", "Monday morning") depend on the time and day. I really like that detail (and the little icons that come with it on mobile, like couches!).
For a while (you still see it in old screenshots), there were options like "snooze forever" and "snooze until I'm at a certain place" that would require location access. Those are gone.
If you would like to change what time morning, afternoon and evening mean for you, that is set in Google Keep (both on mobile and the web. It's a shared setting - Gmail should have the setting available too, but it doesn't.

I didn't think so much could be said about snoozing, but I thought the same about muting, too 🙈 . Like forwarding Chat to Gmail, little features can go a long way!

Gmail can uniquely accommodate your own way of working, whatever that may be. Maybe you incorporate some of those ideas - try out snoozing today and see how that email bounces back. Thank you for reading!

#gmailPublished 2020-04-16 by Holger Matthies.Republished 2022-01-20 by Holger Matthies.Modified 2022-01-20 by Holger Matthies.Written listening to Dennis Kenzo & Sveta B. - Sweet Lie

Photo by Acharaporn Kamornboonyarush from Pexels

Page updated

Report abuse