MG Seigler on his new email game plan:
From now on (or at least, for an indeterminate set amount of time), I’m going to try to only respond to email at a set time during each day. I’m going to put an hour (or perhaps two) in my calendar for this at the end of the day. And in that hour (or two), I’m not going to do anything besides email.
I know people get more email than me, but I just don’t get how people think solutions like the above will work. All that does is makes you not as responsive, more overwhelmed because your inbox is always huge, and always behind.
With email I have come to the realization that you either need to check (and respond to) it regularly or dump it entirely.
I don’t see how limiting email usage to an hour or so a day is any better than just not using it at all. Perhaps because some people get responses from you instead of no one getting responses, but that just seems like you are setting yourself up for disaster. People know you use email, but you rarely respond, whereas just letting people know you don’t use email seems like you are setting a more reasonable expectation.