Did you know that Kanban in Gmail is one of the best ways to enhance your inbox productivity? By implementing a visual, more concise wauy to view your emails, you can benefit your workflow and team collaboration.
According to Gmail stats, the average workers gets around 120 emails per day. Which means teams have to deal with a lot of internal and external communication to facilitate their tasks. Given its importance, the method you use to manage your email matters.
In this article, we’ll dive into one of the most popular project management startegies and how it can optimize your email-based workflows: Kanban.
What’s Kanban?
Kanban is a project management method developed by Toyota in the 40s to optimize manufacturing resources. The main concern was establishing a productive line that minimized loss and waste, all while keeping up with individual steps.
In short, by monitoring each step of your factory, you can notice patterns, predict outcomes, and use your resources accordingly.
Today, this method is valuable for companies across the board, especially tech startups, that require a flexible, adaptable, and accessible way to manage their workflows. However, this method can benefit different departments, such as customer support, sales, and marketing.
What Kanban uses
The Kanban method uses a visual, all-encompassing system to follow an entire project or workflow. There are task cards, columns and boards. At its core, a project can be divided into three columns: to do, in progress and done. So a team can divide their work into small tasks, write them on cards, and set them into these columns, moving them along as needed.
Each board can represent a department, product/service, or workflow, depending on the team’s needs. You can add more steps, such as a brainstorming stage at the start or a ready-for-approval stage before finalizing.
And the tasks should be small enough that they move along quickly, offering a clear view of the overarching progress.
The Kanban method can be done with actual boards and post-it notes, but for teams that work remotely, across platforms and asynchronously, Kanban in Gmail is a great solution.
The principles of Kanban
- Organize your current work: the basis of Kanban is knowing how your current system works. Instead of redoing your entire workflow, focus on managing the ongoing projects.
- Start incremental changes: as you move your project along, you’ll notice small hurdles. Those can be a sign your system needs change. Kanban is, by design, very flexible, which means you can tweak certain tasks and steps to be more productive.
- Identify priorities: with Kanban in Gmail, you’ll be able to notice which tasks are priorities and why. That allows managers to assign specific plans to their teams in a strategic manner.
- Look for feedback: another advantage of Kanban is that you can monitor the success of specific tasks and projects in real time. With that in mind, teams can also offer feedback constantly, which allows managers to reevaluate ongoing efforts quickly and, if needed, reallocate resources efficiently.
Why should you use Kanban in Gmail?
Kanban boards mean your emails can have much more information. Gmail doesn’t need to be only an inbox. The flexibility of Kanban allows you to create multiple workflows across different Kanban boards, to keep track of multiple activities such as CRM, Helpdesk system, project management, and so on.
Pros of implementing Kanban in Gmail
The biggest benefit of using Kanban in Gmail is that it’s a visual tracker. So instead of browsing through endless messages, your team can check the progress of each workflow at a glance.
So instead of CC and BCCs cluttering your inbox, you get the entire task inside a dedicated card. This is even more useful for customer-facing teams, like customer support.
When your support team receives a customer question or complaint, being efficient makes a difference. After all, a good customer service email should be clear, and concise and reach the client as soon as possible. But with multiple new messages entering your inbox daily, it’s hard to keep up.
Often, support agents have to collaborate on an answer, requiring a lot of back and forth before sending a solution to the customer. If this process is done through a Kanban board, you can monitor each reply’s progress to foster efficiency. This leads to overall productive workflows and better customer service metrics as well.
A Kanban board is also beneficial for internal communication. When a team is working together to develop a new product or close sales, they should keep up with their collaborators’ progress. That’s because a visual tracker helps managers redefine strategies according to real-time feedback.
For example, if the Sales team is reaching out to multiple potential clients, monitoring how many move to the next stage in negotiations can help you check for bottlenecks and find solutions quickly.
The limitations you need to know
While Kanban is very useful for most teams, it’s important to know that it isn’t the only possible solution – and there are some drawbacks.
The first point to consider is that not all workflows adapt well to Kanban. In fact, if the tasks can’t be broken down into small, incremental progress, it’s time to reevaluate your options.
Kanban boards can help you view your email-based tasks in a more flexible form, but some tasks might require more detail, with your inbox featuring both a traditional email list and a preview view, that allows users to add more resources to tasks.
Another potential issue is the learning curve: some teams take a while to adapt to Kanban and it derails productivity. To make sure Kanban is useful, your tasks need to be clear and time-sensitive. If they stay too long in the same spot, that means your boards aren’t aligned to the ongoing projects and your team might spend too long trying to adapt it to the structure.
The main concern, however, is information overload. Your boards shouldn’t be cluttered and disorganized, otherwise, it’ll defeat the visualization purpose.
Best practices when using Kanban in Gmail
Before you even begin using Kanban in Gmail, you should be aware of some essential best practices to make sure it’s working for you.
Tagging system
Your Kanban boards should offer a quick view of your projects. Besides the columns, your tasks need to be categorized in a visual way. Color-coding your cards and adding custom tags based on specific projects, teams and products is a great way to ensure the timeline is clear.
Archiving system
Decluttering needs to happen as well. Your team needs to have rules for deleting/archiving cards after they are finished. For instance, if you use Gmail as a helpdesk system, what happens after your card moves from in progress to answered? Archiving tickets in a timely manner ensures there’s no information overload.
That being said, you should have a process to collect and document the information attached to these cards. Your IT team, for example, should have data on time spent solving issues and your marketing agents should keep track of campaign rates.
Turn Gmail into your Team’s Workspace.
- 2.5x faster email responses.
- 20 hours less spent per month, per team member.
- 40% more deadlines achieved and happier teams.
How to actually implement Kanban in Gmail
Now that you know the advantages of using Kanban in Gmail to organize and streamline your work, the next step is implementing it. There are to main methods to do it:
Method 1: Connecting to task manager software
You can use a dedicated task management tool to organize your projects with a Kanban board. There are multiple options, free and paid, that allow users to create personalized panels and categories to follow their workflows.
One example is Hitask, a simple software that allows teams of up to 5 members to track their projects in multiple forms, including Kanban.
The importing process is easy. Just send your Gmail-based tasks to a specific email address and it’ll update your board accordingly. Then you can add extra files, set due dates in your team calendar, and sort tasks by priority.
Some tools offer connection to Gmail via add-ons. That way, you can send a specific task to your boards directly from your Gmail inbox. This method can be productive if your team is working on concurrent tasks since people can work on their individual inboxes while keeping everyone updated.
For sales teams, for example, this type of tool is ideal: each agent can do their Sales CRM in Gmail, but update the board to reflect the overall progress.
Method 2: Using a shared inbox tool
The other, more practical option, is implementing a Gmail shared inbox. With a shared inbox, your team’s entire workspace is collaborative. This means the team can access incoming mail simultaneously and work on related tasks without leaving the same interface.
A shared inbox can be a great scenario for using Kanban in Gmail, considering that all the internal and external communication happens through this workspace.
Here’s how it works:
- You set up a team address, such as support@companyname or sales@companyname.
- Then, you choose a shared inbox software, like our solution DragApp.
- The next step is inviting your team members to access it.
On the shared inbox, you can set up a workspace that aligns with your workflow, including Kanban, Here’s how it looks on Drag:
Everyone who has access to this workspace will be able to check, manage, and sort tasks based on the emails your inbox receives. So instead of forwarding messages and threads, all team members can monitor each project’s progress and conclusion.
Drag is also based on Gmail’s interface since it’s an add-on. That means you don’t have a steep learning curve and the onboarding is much easier.
Practicality is also a focus here: instead of manually importing emails and transforming them into tasks, Drag already automates the process for your team, which streamlines the workflow and allows people to focus on the next steps.
As your work continues, you’ll be able to benefit form Kanban’s simple interface, acknowledging any hurdles and following feedback to build more efficient systems.
Why a shared inbox enhances Kanban
There are some additional benefits of using a shared inbox for Kanban in Gmail. Besides visually streamlining your work, Drag’s resources can help you redefine your team’s efforts to build efficiency in the long run.
Automation
Traditional task management tools still require users to import and export date from their email inbox. That isn’t the most productive way to work, since a manager has to update everyone. With a shared inbox, not only everyone has real-time access to incoming mail, but the platform automatically sorts them into tasks.
With Drag, you can create custom automation rules that sort and tag tasks according to email content. For instance, as soon as your customer support team receives a new message from a client inquiring about errors, it’ll be added to the to-do column on your Kanban board with the relevant tag.
When the team opens the shared board, they’ll see what has to be done without having to open the card itself.
Workflow management
Collaboration is key for a productive team and Kanban fosters this. Instead of having to manually check with your team on their progress, you can use the platform to monitor and offer help whenever needed.
With Drag, managers can assign their team tasks manually and automatically, based on workload, availability, and priorities. Each card/task can be assigned to specific members, who will have it added to their lists. You can also add due dates to help them prioritize better and checklists that help users evaluate their progress easily. After they get through each step, they can move the card to the next stage.
Here’s a look into a card:
Another key collaboration feature is @mentions. Mentions allow users to tag another team member to add the card to their list. For example, if an IT team is working on a product and they need a reviewer’s feedback, it’s pretty simple: just @ them to call their attention to the next steps.
Internal communication
Kanban in Gmail is useful when your main concern is decluttering and simplifying your email-based workflows, right? That means your Kanban tools, like a shared inbox, should minimize the steps to move a task forward and help you focus internal communication on what truly matters.
Drag, for instance, offers task-based live chats. That means team members working on a specific card can chat inside it, which allows people to follow up quickly. If someone is working on writing a sales pitch, for example, they can ask their collaborators for help in real-time.
While Kanban itself is a visual method, it benefits from other resources, such as adding all relevant information to cards so that team members don’t need to reach out and ask further questions. With Drag, you can upload files directly to cards and custom shared email notes, that help keep everyone in the loop.
Of course, teams aren’t always online, so there needs to be a system that updates you on any relevant changes when you log into a shared inbox. With Drag, an activity log notifies users of any changes made to the cards they’re tagged on and assigned to.
Tracking and analytics
Regular feedback is a critical part of the Kanban method. After all, it was developed and optimized to offer fast teams the ability to evaluate and change their processes based on incremental changes. Ideally, the cards should have a fast cycle through the columns on your Kanban board, reflecting a growing, productive workspace.
With that in mind, when using Kanban in Gmail, managers need to organize and track their workspace based on reliable data. Drag offers custom analytics reports based on filters.
You can track information such as user productivity, board response times, and volume of new cards based on time and dates.
For example, if you add custom filters to your projects and track tag reports, you can see which tasks show up more often in your inbox and require additional attention. This can help managers relocate resources and agents to specific projects and workflows to enhance productivity.
This aligns with the Kanban methodology because it helps leaders make evidence-based decisions to promote growth and minimize barriers.
The benefits of using Kanban in Gmail
At its core, Kanban is a simple, clear way to visualize your work. By streamlining and organizing your tasks and checking their steps to a conclusion, you can prioritize your time and resources.
With the help of tools like a shared inbox, the managers and collaborators can automate the process, collect feedback, and build a functional system.
Using Kanban in Gmail helps teams, especially at small and medium-sized companies, focus their efforts on tasks that move their projects along and eliminate bottlenecks. That allows them to concentrate on what matters.
Turn Gmail into your Team’s Workspace.
- 2.5x faster email responses.
- 20 hours less spent per month, per team member.
- 40% more deadlines achieved and happier teams.