For many hard-working people, email has naturally become a significant part of our everyday lives. When we wake up in the morning, the first thing we do is check our email; when we get to work, the first thing we do is check our email; on our lunch break, we check our email; before we leave the office, we check our email; when we’re getting ready for bed, we check our email.

There are some studies that say the more we check our email, the harder it is to remove ourselves from our work in order to live our normal lives—to the point where it can have detrimental effects on our mental state. However, the fact of the matter is that even if we’re limiting how often we check our email, we will have to deal with all the unread messages sitting in our inboxes at some point.

If we have to deal with our Gmail inboxes anyway, we should be taking the time to learn how to make the experience more seamless and personalized so we don’t have to spend as nearly as much time managing emails. Here, we have 16 tips and tricks you can use to create a seamless Gmail inbox.

gmail hacks and tips for more productive email

These 16 tips and tricks for creating a seamless Gmail inbox will make checking emails even easier to do. Instead of taking the time to search through one main inbox for important emails and getting lost in all the spam and advertisements from stores you swear you only shopped at once, you can use priority inboxes, create labels, use stars, or even make separate folders.

The more of these tricks you incorporate into your Gmail inbox, the less likely you’ll find yourself wasting time on tasks that could be done within minutes, freeing you from your computer and letting you keep your work life and personal life separate.