Through the evolution of e-mail, from our inbox, to Folders, to Labels liberating us from literally losing email in so many Folders, we settle at the final step in ultimate organization of the in-box. If we are to effectively optimize the Labelling system, we must be careful when we create our labels. If you find yourself looking at your labels list as ONE BIG BLOB of names and words, each of which you must carefullly read in order to decide which labels to query in your search, then I recommend you read on– perhaps the technique i developed for maximizing my gmail in-box might help you too.

If you need help with your inbox, then chances are you don’t have a whole lot of time on your hands right now. I’ll save you the exhaustion of reading this entire article by posting my illustration here, before the explanation. In order to completely understand why i’ve chosen to structure the heirarchy as i have, i recommend you read the next few paragraphs to gain insight into my reasoning for the alphanumeric system employed here.

Gmail labels are a tremendous help in finding archived mail, but just as often happens with too many Folders, every moment we spend trying to figure out which label was assigned to that mail is a moment wasted. I’ve experienced first-hand that labels can get out-of-hand even faster than folders– by the very nature of labeling, i have allowed creative wit to influence label names which came back to haunt me later when i realized i had absolutely no idea why that label is listed. Lables can appear to accumulate faster than Folders also because, unlike Folders which can be filled at once with as many items as we can select, the Gmail Label is created as an added step to the process of archiving a single message, at which time the new label for that single item becomes visible in the top-level of the Label list– we can not have sub-labels, as we can have sub-folders.

The inability to create sub-labels may seem insignificant, but if use Gmail’s labeling system for a few months and you may find yourself with a list of labels extending far beyond the visible scope of one “page” of the monitor screen. You do not want to scroll while checking e-mail. If you don’t mind scrolling for email, then what is the point of cleaning the in-box in the first place?
Finding myself with too many nonsensical labels in more than one Gmail account, when I was invited yet again to create another Gmail account, I decided that this time my Label names would be logical according to the type of mail i tend to receive, and they would be structured in such a way that I could add to them if i needed to without them taking on an erratic, unstructured appearance when glancing down the list, or when scrolling through the labels if i end up with too many to fit on one screen.

To understand my technique, you must understand the alphanumeric ordering system employed by Gmail. Gmail Labels are organized first by non-alphanumerical characters, such as the octothorpe and the underscore, then numbers come in, starting with Zero, and finally the Alphabet. We will focus on the numbers first because in order to create a logical heirarchy, we must have control over our “top-level” items.
Naming the top-level, for example, as 1_Friends, 2_Family, and so on, all the way perhaps to 10_work, 11_finances, may appear as a fine choice for establishing a heirarchy– that is if you want it to appear on screen as:

• 1_Friends
• 10_work
• 11_finances
• 2_family
• etc.

As you can see, any label beginning with a numeral “1″ will appear before, or physically speaking on the screen, above the “2″ in the heirarchy, even though we perceive the number as “ten” and “eleven”, numbers which we know occurr later in the number-line. If one would wish to employ this method of categorization, which is similar to a suggested Gmail organizational technique I’ve seen elsewhere, then any numbers “below ten” should begin with a zero if they are to appear before the “2″ in the heirarchy, so the revised list would then be:

• 01_Friends
• 02_family
• 10_work
• 11_finances
• etc.

NOTE: if you know that you are going to need numbers extending into the hundreds, then you MUST again compensate for the alphanumeric sorting scheme by adding TWO zeros before the “ones” and ONE zero before the “tens”, as in the next list:

• 001_Friends
• 002_family
• 011_finances
• 100_work
• etc.

I don’t want you to focus on these numbers too much yet because we have yet to prepare the sub-lable heirarchy. My added level of depth enables this primary level of the heirarchy to cascade into a more accurate, more manageable categorization scheme (than others i’ve seen advertised as the “solution” to an organized Gmail Labeling system), and ultimately extends the limits of sub-labels to a much more vast capacity.
In my method, instead of using numbers to organize groups of Labels, and then to gather “sub-labels”– essentially names, topics, subjects, content– which is in some way a “subject to itself, but also a category of ____”, where the blank is the very top-level Lable.

I decided that, in order to keep a handle on the diverse subject matter in the several email message i receive on any given day, I would need to have a deeper heirarchy than something such as what we saw in the lists previously. I also wanted to give a weight to the very to level items such that only a few types of “things” would actually have a number. If I used numbers for all categories, i would run out of numbers way too fast. I solved this problem by integrating an Alphanumeric system. I decided that I could consider A to be a sub-label of 01, and B would be a sub-label of 10, and C a sub-label of 20, and so on. In this manner, for each 10 numbers, beginning with the “ones” I would have ten Alpha items as sub-labels to their parent Numeral. I’ve taken designed it to have one additional level of accuracy as well by using another numeral level within the Alpha level– at which point it is unlikely that there would be any greater division of sub-labels, although the method is scalable to allow for it– simply employ your own creativity.

To understand what I mean by using numerals at ONLY the very top level Label, and then Alpha for the Sub-Labels, we might have a list something like this example: 01_People, A-01_Friends, A-02_Family, A-04_professors, A-01a_George, A-04a_Dr.Jones, 20_Food, C-01_Groceries, C-02_Delivery, C-03_FastFood, and C-03a_McDonanlds, C-03b_TacoBell, and so on. By keeping this structure, I am able to figure out where my mail might be in only a few seconds: the numeral (people or food), if i select number “01″, then i go to the Alpha-num (A-01,A-02,A-03,etc). It’s important to note, if employing this method, that Gmail treats the underscore “_” differently than the dash “-”, so be sure to recognize how i’ve used it. The underscore separates the “Selector Characters” from the “Declaration Name”, whereas the dash is used to separate the alpha character from the numerals in the sub-labels, which the underscore retains its position as separator between that alpha-numeric “Selector Characters” and the sub-label names.

It may take a moment or two to catch on, but i think it will come to you pretty easily once you see what’s going. I hope that in publising this method, I might help someone to make a more comfortable, more efficient labeling system for their own Label-based email.

Cheerio!