I picked up the following quote from
a post in Tim Ferris’ blog:
Jim — May 29, ‘08 – 10:17 PM
“Another effect of reading and replying to e-mail frequently is that you don’t allow others responses to build up. Which means you may cover the same ground they do (costing you time you didn’t […]

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There are a couple of arguments floating around out that militate against the idea of a Zero Inbox.
In my last post I gave the example of someone who has the problem of having thousands of unread emails.
The first comes from author Tim Ferriss, who has a practice of checking email only once every 1o days. […]

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I can’t quite recall where I read this suggestion, but I have been trying it out and it seems to work.
It’s very simple - for every important piece of email, send a reply, even a short one, to say one of the following messages:

Thanks
It’s received and will be acted on and here’s the promised due […]

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New devices make it easier than ever for professionals to get stuck in unproductive activities that damage their peace of mind.
One of the more destructive habits that they enable is the ability to check email at all times during the day and night. In the thinking of the 2Time Management system, it enables a user […]

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An article with the above name was published in the Jamaica Sunday Gleaner on February 17th, and can be found at the following link:

http://go-jamaica.com/jobsmart/view_article_details.php?id=221
It echoes many of my thoughts on the topic.

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While there have been quite a few posts on various blogs about maintaining a Zero Inbox, or an Empty Inbox for email, I take the opposite tack and assert that an overflowing in-box of a sign of lack of productivity.
This is not meant as a value judgment or a moral conclusion.
Instead, it is meant to […]

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The email in-box is nothing more than a mouth.
Huh?
Well, the mouth is an ideal capture point. It allows for temporary storage of a certain amount of food, and performs its function perfectly as a “staging area” for the process of digestion, and sending essential nutrition to the rest of the body.
When food stays […]

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As
mentioned before, the task of comparing one worker to another in terms of their productivity has become much harder.
However, the results of examining their in-box can give a good insight into how productive they are. In other words, a person who has an in-box of thousands of items is less productive than one […]

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Back in the old days it was easy.
The unproductive guy was the one who still had a bunch of bricks sitting in a pile waiting to be assembled into a wall, while the productive guy was finished long before, and was onto the next task of digging the trench.
Productivity was easily measured by throughput […]

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One of the easiest ways to check whether or not someone is at a higher belt level is to observe carefully how they handle email.
What do they have in their in-box? Is the number of emails always kept small? Does email get sent to them that they never reply to? Does email routinely get […]

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