Why Gmail labels matter when juggling projects
When I started freelancing I seriously underestimated how quickly my inbox would turn into a dumpster fire. I had client A sending contracts, client B forwarding thirty image attachments, and my random Amazon receipts sitting in between them. I thought folders would help, but Gmail actually doesn’t use folders — it uses labels. The strangest part is that a single email can wear more than one label at a time, like a coat of many colors. That was the first thing that clicked for me. I realized I could tag one email “Website Redesign” and also tag it “Invoices” if it was both. Same message, two labels, no duplication.
Beginners usually don’t realize that a label in Gmail doesn’t move the email anywhere. It’s still sitting in your inbox unless you archive it. I used to panic and think “Did I just lose that message?” but no, it was just filtered out of the inbox view. Once I got comfortable with that, I started creating permanent project labels for each bigger job I had running. It felt a little like having all my manila folders taped to the same wall instead of in cabinets. Messy, but at least I knew where things belonged.
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Setting up a project based label structure
The first mistake I made was naming labels too vaguely. I had one called “Work” and one called “Personal.” Useless. When I searched for that file contract, it could be under work or personal or who knows. Now, I name labels exactly by client or project name. If I’m building a Shopify store for a bakery, the label is literally “Bakery Shopify Project.”
To create one, you scroll to the left sidebar in Gmail, hit “More,” then “Create new label.” Type what you want, hit enter, and that’s it. You can even nest labels under others. For example I have “Bakery Shopify Project” as the parent, and under it “Invoices,” “Design Reviews,” and “Content Approvals.” You get a little arrow next to the parent and it folds out like an accordion.
If you want to make it cleaner, you can pick a label color. I got carried away and made ten different neon colors and suddenly it looked like a rave in my Gmail panel. Now I stick to a consistent system — green for financial, blue for creative, orange for urgent. If you set too many random colors, you won’t even see the structure anymore ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
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Using filters to automate label assignments
After about three days of manually dragging messages into labels I realized that was not sustainable. Gmail filters do the heavy lifting. You click the little settings gear, go to “See all settings,” then the “Filters and Blocked Addresses” tab. From there you can set conditions like “From this email address” or “Has these words.” Once you set the condition you tell it what to do — apply label, archive it, forward it, whatever.
My favorite is filtering by domain name. For example, if all bakery staff emails came from “@sweetcrumbs.com,” I created one filter that grabs every single one of those and slaps the “Bakery Shopify Project” label on automatically. No manual sorting. I also had to get a little clever with keyword matching. One client always wrote “Draft v” in the subject line for new versions, so I filtered anything with that text into the “Drafts” sublabel. Sometimes the filter preview shows messages you didn’t expect, so always test it before hitting create. I once accidentally labeled every PayPal receipt as “Project Legal” which made zero sense.
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Archiving without losing track of projects
A quick lesson I learned the hard way — archiving isn’t deleting. When you archive an email it just leaves the inbox view but still lives under whichever label you assigned it. This is actually the trick to keeping the inbox itself clean while still holding onto all your stuff. So instead of staring at 2000 unread messages, I get to archive everything the filter has already labeled. Then when I need to find the bakery’s design notes, I just click on the “Design Review” label and boom, they’re all there.
At first I was nervous because it felt like the emails were vanishing. I even used search to double check they still existed. But after a week I noticed the world didn’t end and my inbox anxiety dropped. Honestly the biggest secret with Gmail labels is pairing them with archiving — if you only use labels without archiving, your inbox still looks like chaos.
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Balancing labels when projects overlap
Here’s where it gets trickier. Sometimes projects overlap and emails belong to two or three categories at once. For example, I had one message that was both an invoice and a design revision. With folders in Outlook that would have meant choosing one or making a copy. But Gmail labels let me attach multiple at the same time. I learned to not overthink it. If it logically goes under both, just check both labels. Later, when I’m reconciling invoices, I just click the invoice label. When I’m reviewing designs, I only click the design label. The same email can appear in two different lists depending on how I come at it.
The catch is that labels are not mutually exclusive, so you’ll also see the same email pop up when you click on each label separately. That can throw you off the first time until you realize it’s just the same message being shown in multiple categories. No duplicates are created, thankfully, or I would have lost my mind.
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Cleaning up too many labels after months
I’ll admit this part is a mess for me. At some point I ended up with thirty or forty project labels, some for clients I hadn’t spoken to in a year. It got overwhelming. The small arrow meant I had to scroll endlessly. My fix was to collapse old labels into a single archive folder. I created one parent label called “Old Projects” and dragged outdated labels into it as sublabels. That way they aren’t completely gone but they also don’t clog my sidebar.
You can also hide labels from the sidebar completely by going into settings under the “Labels” tab. There’s an option to “show” or “hide” each one. I made my daily project labels visible and shoved the rest into hidden. Now I only click “more” if I desperately need an old chain. The daily list shrunk down to something that actually fits on half my screen without scrolling — finally.
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Combining labels with search operators
Labels are powerful but sometimes you still have to be a detective. That’s where Gmail’s search operators come in. For example, typing “label:Invoices from:paypal.com” instantly gives me all PayPal receipts I marked as invoices. Or “label:Bakery-Project has:attachment” pulls up every message in that project with any kind of file attached. It saves a ton of time when my filters weren’t smart enough to catch every scenario.
One time I couldn’t find a logo file because I had lazily labeled it “Design.” The search came through because I typed “filename:png.” So labeling plus searching together solves the problem when my organization brain failed me upfront. It also reassures me that even if my labels are far from perfect, I’m not completely doomed — search is like a safety net under the juggling act.
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Making Gmail labels work with external tools
Only after months of using labels did I realize how well they integrate with other tools. For example, I run Zapier to connect Gmail with Trello. My automation triggers whenever a new email has the label “New Task.” That instantly creates a Trello card in the right project board. I also experimented with Google Sheets where a Zap would catch any email with the label “Invoice” and write the date and subject line into a sheet. It wasn’t perfect since Gmail sometimes delayed the trigger, but it worked more often than not.
There was a funny bug one morning where Zapier kept creating duplicates because Gmail marked the same thread with “Invoice” again each time a new reply came in. The fix was to add a filter in Zapier to only trigger if the subject line contained “Paid.” A little hacky, but it solved the chaos of twenty extra Trello cards generated for one invoice conversation. If I didn’t have labels, those automations wouldn’t have any way to know which emails were which.
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When labels stop syncing between devices
The strangest bug I ever hit was when my laptop showed perfectly labeled threads but my phone just displayed them as unlabeled. I thought I lost weeks of work. Turns out the Gmail app caches labels and sometimes doesn’t refresh instantly. Refreshing manually by pulling down fixed it, but I had to learn that the labels are stored on the server side. So no, they weren’t gone. The phone app was just being stubborn. I double checked by logging into Gmail from a web browser on my phone, and everything was fine there.
I came across a support thread where someone wrote, “My entire label list disappeared from the app, and I thought Google nuked my projects.” That’s exactly how it feels the first time. But the truth is, the labels didn’t vanish, they just take a while to refresh or you might need to re sync the account. It was more of a display hiccup than a data loss, but it freaks you out until you know better.
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