10 Google Apps Tips and Tricks
- Schedule your emails in Gmail
- Have multiple inboxes to keep your emails organized
- Mute notifications in Meets
- Forward conversations from Meets to your Gmail
- Pin tabs in Chrome
- In-between to-do lists in Google Calendar
- Create workspace folders in Google Drive
- Use Google Slides to engage your audience
- Translate documents in Google Docs
- Google Drive and Gmail offline mode
Power through your WFH with Google Apps Tips and Tricks!
Whether you are new to working remotely or used to it, a work-from-home practice will most likely be the norm as part of the new normal post COVID-19 pandemic. Google’s suite of apps is an essential part of our productivity work. From email clients, calendars, to videoconferencing, Google finds a way to help us improve our daily productivity.
Want to maximize your WFH experience? Here are some cool Google app features that you should check out:
Gmail: Schedule emails
One of the problems with a Work-from-Home setting is that there are times colleagues tend to send work emails beyond work hours and even on weekends. To solve this, Gmail has a scheduling feature where you can schedule when your emails will be sent to respect the work-life balance of others.
Gmail: have multiple inboxes
Want to keep your inbox organized? Gmail lets you create multiple inboxes based on rules you create so you can attend to more important emails faster than ever.
Meet: mute notifications
Being focused is important when attending a virtual meeting, and Google Meet lets you mute notifications for certain time periods (from 30 minutes to 8 hours) so that you can stay focused on the agenda.
Meet: forward conversations
Should you receive a message while in the middle of a Meet videoconference, you can attend to them later on by forwarding those conversations to your Gmail inbox.
Chrome: Pin tabs
Working through multiple tabs can be a hot mess sometimes, leading to accidentally closing important ones (it has happened so many times to users). To solve this, Chrome lets you pin tabs to prevent you from closing them. While you can pin as many tabs as you like, Google suggests keeping your pinned tabs to less than 10.
Calendar: In-between to-do lists
If, by any chance, you have time to spare in between meetings, you can designate tasks that you can do during your downtime by adding a task through Calendar.
Drive: Create workspace folders
Dealing with multiple files can be a pain sometimes, especially if it involves different projects. Drive aims to make that easier with its Workspace folder feature, where you can add files and sort them per project.
Slides: engage your audience
When doing presentations with Slides, you can enable Audience Q&A to engage participants in asking questions. By letting the audience post questions, you can easily respond to them, making the whole presentation more engaging than ever.
Docs: Translate documents
Need to translate a document for you (or your colleague) to easily understand in their native language? Docs has a feature that translates text to your desired language in seconds!
Drive and Gmail: Offline mode
Need to work on a few emails and documents will not online? Gmail and Drive’s offline mode lets you get things done while there’s no internet, and resume everything once you are connected. To make this possible, Drive and Gmail store the data in your browser’s cache. In addition, Drive also allows you to download your data so that you can view them later.