[trevoragilbert]

My problem with solutions like this is that they never seem to fit any other people's methods of working. Saying things like "Only check e-mail twice per day" is not going to work for 95% of the people that are reading this (rough guess).

If I only checked email twice per day, I'd just end the day with 500 emails that need responding to all in one bunch. On top of that, many of them would no longer be timely, disrupting other people's days and slowing others down.

Am I alone in thinking like this?

[rwallace]

If you get five hundred e-mails per day and many of them need replies on a timescale shorter than a few hours, presumably replying to e-mail is (a large part of how you do) your job. Which is fine; that means if you spend a few hours a day replying to e-mail, you're spending a few hours a day doing your job, which is as it should be. Articles like this one are addressed to people for whom e-mail is a distraction from their jobs.

[dingaling]

> that means if you spend a few hours a day replying to e-mail, you're spending a few hours a day doing your job

Sadly not. In the corporate world, if an activity doesn't have a timesheet task code associated, it doesn't exist.

Clearing e-mails doesn't have a task code, so effeectively it's a few hours unbillable on top of your working hours each day.

[rwallace]

> Sadly not. In the corporate world, if an activity doesn't have a timesheet task code associated, it doesn't exist.

Then don't do it. If that stops other people getting their jobs done, that's not your problem. Trying to fix dysfunctional organization problems with "I will work harder" doesn't get you appreciated, it gets you a ticket to the glue factory. (Reference from Animal Farm by George Orwell.)

[jpwgarrison]

Super happy to be in the middle ground here. Post startup, pre-IPO. We track our time, but putting an hour or three as "phone/email" into toggl.com is normal.