I highly recommend disabling mobile and desktop email notifications and only checking it at certain

times you set throughout your workday. Otherwise, it can become a massive distraction that divides

your focus and kills your ability to do more productive tasks necessary to excel in your work.

If you are just using the “out of the box” Gmail settings without any third-party extensions or plugins,

then you’re really missing out on the full power of Gmail can do for improving the workflow of your

mobile office. I’m sure you’ll find some of these free Gmail plugins will become indispensable tools

for your managing your email.

1. Rapportive: Detailed Profiles of Your Email Contacts

How would you like to gain a deeper understanding of who you are emailing in an instant? Rapportive

 is a browser plugin for Gmail that replaces the ads on Gmail’s sidebar with a detailed profile

of the sender’s social profiles and their current work positions. It works as an add-on for Firefox,

Chrome and Safari and it’s completely free.

2. Boomerang For Gmail: Schedule Your Emails For Max Impact

Boomerang is like Gmail on steroids. It makes it easy to schedule your emails to be sent at specific times like the start of the workday. This can be particularly useful if you’re communicating with people in different time zones.

You can also send follow-up reminders to yourself, archive messages and return important emails

to the top of your inbox when you know you will have time to read them.

3. Unroll.me: Mass Unsubscribe From Email Lists

If you’re like me, you probably subscribe to a lot of email lists and newsletters that you never read.

But it’s too much work to manually unsubscribe from them all so you just ignore them as best that

you can.

How would you like to be able to see a list of all your email subscriptions and unsubscribe with

one-click from every list you don’t read anymore? Well, Unroll.me is exactly what you are looking

for. It also has a great daily digest feature, which allows you to segment your email subscriptions

and then receive a daily email summarizing the entire segment. All it costs is the price of a single tweet!

4. AwayFind: No More Checking Your Emails on Vacation

If you find yourself constantly checking your emails on vacation or when you’re trying to relax then

 you need AwayFind. This great free Gmail plugin monitors your email inbox for important messages

and only notifies you by a SMS text message if an email is absolutely urgent. Their free account allows

 for the monitoring of a single Gmail account.

5. ToDoIst: Email Task Management

How would you like better integration of your email and task management capabilities in Gmail? ToDoIst

let’s you turn your important emails into actionable tasks, add to-do items for projects, set reminders

 and set deadlines. Their feature Todoist Karma also allows you to track your email productivity and

visualize your improvements over time. Another good option is TaskForce but I think you have to pay

 for them all after a free trial (to-do list app Any.Do also has a Chrome extension that is free).

6. News.me: Daily Social Media Digests

Don’t want to waste your time checking Twitter and Facebook when you’re working? Use this handy

tool to stop filling your email inbox with email notifications from these social networks. Instead, you

can get a daily summary of all the top posts from your social networks so you don’t miss out (FOMO!)

 on the important stuff. The best option I’ve found since Twitter bought and closed down Summify.

7. FollowupThen: Never Miss A Follow Up Again

One of the cardinal email mistakes is not following up with hot prospects and important contacts.

FollowUpThen is a Gmail plugin that ensures you’ll never miss a follow up and you’ll impress

prospects with your punctuality and determination. As they say in sports, it’s all about the follow

through…in business, it’s all about the follow up! You can even send reminders to other people on

your team to follow up.

8. WiseStamp: A Kick Ass Email Signature

Email signatures can be so boring and predictable, which means they will most likely get completely

ignored. WiseStamp is one of my favorite free Gmail plugins because it allows you to spice things up

 a bit with your photo, your websites, important updates and graphic icons for social profiles. You

can even integrate Google Analytics and use it to optimize your email signatures for engagement and clickthroughs.

9. Enhancements for Gmail: Upgrade Your Gmail Experience

If you are someone who loves to customize and personalize the digital tools you use each day then

you are going to love this Chrome extension. It cleans up the Gmail user interface by giving you the

option to remove the ads, the chat bar, the invite friend messages. It also ensures Gmail is your default

email application and provides you with handy desktop email notifications if that’s your thing. Another

excellent free Gmail plugin for customization is Gmelius.

10. Gmail Offline: Access Your Emails When You’re Offline

This clever web app allows you to access your Gmail inbox — even when you’re offline! It does this by

 synchronizing your Gmail inbox to your computer. It also has a beautiful interface for reading and

responding to emails (that can be instantly sent when you reconnect). If you’re stuck somewhere

without LTE or wi-fi this free Gmail tool could save your sanity.

11. CloudMagic: Integrate Gmail with Productivity Tools

This Gmail tool really blew me away when I was first introduced to it. It gives you seamless integration

 between your Gmail account and cloud-based tools like Evernote, Pocket, Trello, Salesforce, Zendesk

 and Mailchimp — which you can access and update without leaving your Gmail inbox. They also have

nicely designed iPhone and Android apps. To integrate with cloud storage and photography websites

 like Instagram or Flickr use Cloudy For Gmail.

12. Streak: A CRM Within Gmail

Steak is a customer relationship management (CRM) that is completely integrated with Gmail. Manage

 sales cycles, customer support, bug tracking, hiring, send emails later and use snippets so you can

automatically have boiler plate email templates to quickly modify and send. This new Gmail tool is

 currently in beta so it’s completely free.

13. Batched Inbox for Gmail: Get Your Emails In Batches At Set Times

With Batched Inbox plugin for Gmail you can receive emails hourly or at set times in batches so you

don’t have to be constantly interrupted by new email alerts. A great tool to use if you want to schedule

emails at specific times throughout your workday to guarantee they won’t interrupt the flow of your work.

14. mxHero Toolbox: See Who Opens Your Emails and Attachments

How would you like to track when your emails or their attachments are opened? This tool will notify you

the moment your email is opened. You can also track links in your emails, send reminders, send emails

at optimal times and even protect your privacy with self-destructing emails.

15. Checker Plus for Gmail: Desktop Notification for Multiple Gmail Accounts

This is the best tool I’ve found for painlessly managing multiple email accounts with desktop notifications.

However, I recommend that you turn if off when you really want to focus on getting work done so you

 aren’t dividing your attention by constantly multitasking. I really like the simple integration of the

notifications with Chrome so you can quickly check your different Gmail and Google Apps for Business

 accounts with a single click.