Never Check Email Before Noon (And Other Thoughts on Doing Your Best Work)

To be efficient, you must do the same with your inbox. This means addressing all the urgent cases right away and maintaining Inbox Zero every day. If you check your email incessantly, multiple times an hour, you are wasting hours of productivity. Instead, batch your time and clean out your entire inbox at those times. I recommend checking your inbo

An hour dedicated exclusively to a hard project followed by an hour dedicated exclusively to administrative work will produce more total output than if you instead mix these efforts into two hours of fragmented attention.

Unless it is time-urgent, don’t take significant actions on e-mails when you first read them. Instead, quickly place a corresponding action entry in your task system, and continue to read or scan all your new mail to the bottom of your in-box. Then file that mail out of the in-box, and work tasks off your Now Tasks list.

Do not read your emails frequently. Group them together and read them only at specified times.