Super Productivity with Gmail Superstars

If you’ve been around me long enough, you’ll know I’m a huge Google productivity suite fan.   Gmail is by far my favorite email interface.  It’s simple, and powerful.  I’ve got a ton of filters and a good set of labels to streamline my email workflow.  A relatively new feature in Gmail is the superstars that are attached to every email.  Basically, they twelve different styles you can choose from.  There are six stars and six orbs or circles with a variety of markings on them for different purposes.  Here are the superstars Gmail offers now.

Organizing Your Email

If you aren’t familiar with the native star tool, just click the little star in the upper right hand corner of each email.  If you have superstars enabled in the settings properly, you can click multiple times to iterate through the list of superstars.  You can tag an email with on of the above stars or orbs to identify that email later on.  I have four categories for my star usage:  Urgent, Important, Info, and Reply-To.   By simply adding star I can easily file that email, archive it and retrieve it later with all other emails that need the same action.

Creating Quick Links

Stars are great, but to get a list for a specific superstar you have to enter a cryptic code in the search bar.  Entering “has:green-check” will give you a list of all the starred items with a green check.  But, who wants to do that every time?  Gmail created a great little feature called Quick Links.  It’s basically a quick way to save frequent search results.  I use it for action folders to organize my email and access my action items quickly.

Gmail Superstars Cheatsheet

I created a handy dandy cheatsheet for you to use when searching for each superstar in Gmail.  Download it and make your Gmail experience more fun and productive!

Tranparent PNG’s

You can use these recreated images for your own projects.  Here are the transparent PNG images.