alt Hacker NewsEmail is an ignorable communication medium. It has lost relevance due to its ubiquity, which led to its overuse, which led to its redundancy.
There are a lot of stragglers that haven't realized it's redundancy yet, and madly spend a significant percentage of their time and effort organizing this pulsating mass of ever-changing chaos.
If you keep replying, they'll keep asking.
Cut it down to a quick squizz once a day and get in with the actual productive work.
(My experience written as universal. I'm aware there are some important emails - but I challenge that there aren't as many as you think there are)
Edited to add: you can only work on one thing at a time. It should always be the highest priority item. If something comes in via email, there's little to no likelihood that it should be jumping to the top of the pile (email is not a real-time communication platform, and people who think it is should be corrected). An email is like the first pangs of hunger: at least 24 hours from becoming important.
Replies
"you can only work on one thing at a time. It should always be the highest priority item"
The thing you're working on in any given moment is the highest priority thing (in "your" mind) by definition though. If you thought something else was higher priority, you would be doing it instead.
The only "argument" against that requires a third party who deems a different thing higher priority than what you're currently working on, and that leading to a mismatch of what is "highest" priority is, and you're lack of doing it in the moment.
That is idiotic advice. Email is absolutely not ignorable in any real business. We constantly receive important emails from customers / partners / vendors. If we ignored them then we would fail, and deservedly so. They have to be actioned quickly and with careful attention to detail.
I want to sign up for a service that charges people a penny to deliver an email to me -- otherwise the email is undeliverable. Even a minor cost to delivery will dramatically reduce spam.
> I'm aware there are some important emails - but I challenge that there aren't as many as you think there are
The problem is not whether I think it's important. The problem is the customer thinking that's important. Or simply that I need to be aware of what they wrote. Or that I need to be aware of what another vendor wrote.
I'm not saying this is right, I'm saying it's where I'm currently sitting at.