The email's curse: How long will you spend checking your emails today?

I have invested so much time in my emails, and multiple colleagues mentioned that they lost hours and hours of deep work thanks to the urge to answer every new message. Have you felt like this?

“After a few years, I realised I had created a new habit of checking my emails every five minutes. Literally.

From those conversations, I would like to share a few techniques that have been helping me deal with emails and focus on deep work — without ignoring colleagues, and without losing the professionalism we owe to the people we collaborate with.

The trap I fell into

As a researcher I collaborate with many people and sit on multiple committees. These opportunities are fantastic — and, as a result, my inbox fills with important threads that genuinely need a decision from me.

The immediate gratification of getting something done by replying to an important email created an addiction. My deep focus was constantly interrupted, and my productivity suffered. So I built a system.

A productivity system to avoid email distraction

The system has two pillars: communication restructuring (how and when I talk to people) and email management (how the inbox itself is organised). Together they protect a central commitment — my productivity strategies — from being eroded by reactive work.

Communication restructuring

• Define office hours. I reply to email twice a day — once after planning the day, once before closing it.
• Create protocols. Templates and scheduled sends keep responsiveness without forcing me into the inbox.
• Minimise context switching. Outside the two windows, the inbox stays closed.

Email management

• Schedule the email checks. Two windows is enough for almost every collaboration I have.
• Organise by folders that match themes of conversation — papers in progress, supervision, admin, committees. The folder tells you whether to reply now or batch it later.

The goal is to minimise breaks from your deep work while maintaining professionalism in your email box. You do not need to respond to everything immediately — you just need a protocol that decides for you.

On automation and ethics

Even in the era of Large Language Models, we still need to reply to emails. You could automate parts of it — but always think about the ethics of how you would feel about a text you signed but did not write. I am not a fan, but I will elaborate in a future conversation.