[arrrg]

It depends on the particulars, but my preferred approach is actually to turn all work email notifications off (even unread badges).

I check my mail a couple times a day during work hours, usually when I arrive in the morning, after our standup, after my lunch break, sometime during the afternoon and before I leave (but not right when I want to leave, at least a couple of minutes beforehand).

I always pay close attention to immediately deal with all mail I receive, i.e. complete the task immediately (usually if less than five to ten minutes are required), write a to-do item or (my favorite option) archive the mail. The important part is to get it out of your brain and besides archiving or doing it, the best other way is to write it down.

This obviously only works if real time critical information is not usually sent via email (unexpected, action required immediately and minutes to hours required, depending on the complexity) and if no one expects email to be used for time critical information. Luckily we have policies in place to both ensure that email is used for non time-critical information and other more direct channels (Slack, phone, coming over in person) are used for actual time critical information.

I know that this culture part is often the actual hard one. If people expect you to immediately react to email then there is not much you can do inside the expectations and you probably have to turn notifications on.

Even if you leave notifications on, dealing with email immediately (picking doing it immediately, writing a to-do, archiving it) is still a time-management basic and extremely helpful, but it doesn’t work very well if you have that notification gnawing your nerves somewhere in your brain. Dealing with email immediately actually has to mean dealing with it immediately, i.e. the first time you take notice of it.

(This is a very German perspective, though. My probably biased and also very limited experience in communicating with people in the US was one of general hyperactivity and I had the impression that many treated email sort of like a real time communications channel with weird expectations about response times.)

[mhd]

As for the German perspective: There are several big time companies around here who had to institute regulations so that you can't even access your work emails beyond your office hours (BMW, Telekom). So the employees themselves would check them more and the company had to limit that.

Granted, I don't know how much the "Betriebsrat" was prompting that, but I doubt that people themselves are that much different, despite German Gemütlichkeit.

I found that both IT workers and MBAs are IT/MBA first, nationals second.