The Email Story

• 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 for...

• 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 pil...

• 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, t...

• When you don’t know if you’ll get a big reward, small reward, or no reward at all - that's when you are most likely to repeat a behavior and slip into addiction.
• Email is a near-perfect random reward system.
• Random rewards make us want to check email repeatedly in the hope of...

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 th...

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 bi...