cleaning up my gmail

I got kinda tired of my messy Gmail.  I had tons of messages in my inbox, tons of labels, just seemed like I had stuff all over the place.

I went to Settings > Labs and installed a few tools.  Here's how Gmail describes them:

Hide read labels - The visible labels in the navigation bar will be hidden under the 'more' menu when they don't contain any unread conversations.

Nested Labels - Manage your email by sorting it into a hierarchy of labels. Add slashes (/) to label names to express inheritance. For example, if you want a Home label with two child labels named Kids and Shopping, create the three following labels: Home, Home/Kids and Home/Shopping.

Then, I spent some time cleaning out my inbox, creating some nested labels and switching things around.  I adjusted some things on the main page, like collapsing the "Invite a Friend" section and the Chat section.

This looks better (too bad I didn't take a "before" shot!):

Here's a list of the other Gmail Labs stuff that I have enabled; again, the descriptions are provided by Gmail:


Create a Document - Allows you to create a Google Document from an email conversation or a new blank document if your keyboard shortcuts are enabled by hitting 'g' then 'w'.

Default Text Styling - Would you prefer Times New Roman to Arial, or perhaps large text to small text, in the e-mails you send out? Enable this lab, head over to the 'General' tab on the 'Settings' page, and change the default text styling to better suit your preferences.

Sender Time Zone - Should I reply to this mail or just call the guy? Ooops… it's 1 am. Sorry, I didn't mean to disturb…

Undo Send - Oops, hit "Send" too soon? Stop messages from being sent for a few seconds after hitting the send button.