Closing The Email Loop

• 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 ...

• 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...

• 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...

• 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...