Recently, Darren posted that how he used Gmail to clear 10,000 mails in his inbox. The efficient use of Filters and Labels in Gmail to archive messages already present and other incoming emails according to different rules, will help you to keep a clean inbox .

However one negative aspect of this method is that if you try to create a lot of filters to prevent messages from landing into your inbox, it could result into a long list of labels (like what I have). And here the problem is that Gmail arranges labels alphabetically on its own and doesn’t give you much freedom there. There are certain scripts which help you create folders out of labels but not everyone who is a non-geek would be familiar with that. So how do you manage such a long list of labels?

Here is an absolute non-geeky trick to arrange your Gmail labels according to priority. So the most important label comes at the top and so on and so forth. Just look at the screenshot below :

Got the trick? Simple,huh! Just add the alphabets before the label name in the order of their priority. Like in the above screenshot, I have a Google Alert set on my name and I would like to check the corresponding label first, hence its on the top. Then I have filtered my friends’ emails which go into the ‘ Friends ‘ label skipping the inbox and thats also set on high priority by adding an ‘A’ before that .

Also I have my social networking profile notifications filtered into different labels and arranged together. In fact this could also be a nice and hassle free way to mamage your social networking profiles through Gmail labels, so that you don’t miss any friend requests or messages.