I like Gmail. While I recognize it can get lumped into a “social media” bucket and I’m not the biggest fan of pixel tracking, targeted advertisements, and other online marketing shenanigans, I find it to be a nice productivity tool. It also has a nice suite of hotkeys and vim-like shortcuts that allow me to sort and label emails with ease. This is what I really love.

At this point in my life, I am a zero-inbox guy. I apply the 5S mantra to my inbox, “Everything has a place, and everything should go in its place”. So, I have labels for everything. Over the years, I have used different naming conventions and nesting for my labels, and I have finally decided to go with a regular old lower case. I think this will help me continue to use keyboard shortcuts and remain productive. So, I wrote a quick google script to help me migrate from kebab case to space-separated lower case.

I’m not going to go into detail about how to use google scripts here, but you should know I have been using them more and more for productivity tasks. One of my more recent projects allows me to use a google sheet to develop a yearly roadmap with timeline and dates calculations. I then pump those calculated dates out to my team’s shared google calendar events and jira tickets. It has been a massive time saver.

Anyways, here’s the script to rename labels:

Note: google scripts timeout after 5 minutes, so if you have a lot of labels you may run into this error.