Brantley 's Key Ideas from Unsubscribe: How to Kill Email Anxiety, Avoid Distractions, and Get Real Work Done
by Jocelyn K. Glei

• Inbox Zero is a state when you have answered or filed all your email and there are no new unread messages.
• Chipping away at our inbox gives us a sense of satisfaction precisely because the act includes such clear progress indicators.
• Progress is one of the most motivating forces known to humankind.
• Email inboxes make progress so visible which is another reason why email is so attractive.

Our negativity bias toward email means that every email we send or read is interpreted more negatively than it was intended, which is one of the reasons why more email tends to equate more stress.

The lack of social cues in email also forces us to spend more time trying to interpret what the sender meant: Are they angry? Are they satisfied? Should I apologize?

• The rule of reciprocity states that if someone does a favor for you, you want to return the favor even if the favor wasn’t something you wanted.
• Numerous experiments have shown that humans tend to adhere to the rule of reciprocity in social interactions.
• When emails start piling up, you begin to feel stressed out.

• Set aside 30-60 minutes in the late morning and a similar amount of time in the mid- to late afternoon for checking email.
• Turn off notifications and don't check email throughout the day.
• Just having your email program open in the background of your computer screen as you focus on another task can decrease performance.
• Avoid such distractions by quarantining your email in a separate area from your main workspace.

• Every time you stop doing a task you are working on to check your email, you incur what researchers call a “switching cost”.
• It typically takes at least 25 minutes to get properly back into the task after you’ve interrupted yourself.
• The more frequently you check email, the less productive you are and the less happy you are.

The best way to get less email is to send less email.

A great way to do this is to proactively close the conversation as soon as it’s convenient. This means always striving to respond to emails completely, cutting off the possibility of a long back-and-forth.

Do a bit more work when you send or reply to emails.