Lesson overview

Objective: Establish a fixed routine for checking email

Summary: Email management is crucial for academics trying to protect their most valuable resource: their attention. Starting your day with email surrenders your cognitive energy to other people’s priorities, undermining your ability to focus on high-value academic work. Instead, aim to create intentional boundaries around email, treating it as a tool that supports your work rather than dictates your schedule.

Key habits:

1. Don’t check email first thing – reserve your morning hours for high-value tasks
2. Schedule specific times for email (morning triage, mid-morning urgent replies, afternoon processing)
3. Turn off notifications – you’ll get to messages during your scheduled sessions
4. End each day with a quick inbox review and then disconnect until tomorrow

Introduction

Email is a deceptive distraction: it feels productive but often pulls us away from our most meaningful work. Like many academics, you’re constantly juggling competing priorities – from research projects and teaching preparation to administrative duties and student support. When faced with an unstructured day, your inbox provides a ready-made list of tasks, making it particularly tempting to start there.

This is why so many of us begin our day by checking email, letting other people’s priorities dictate our schedule. Each message demands attention, fragmenting our focus and consuming mental bandwidth that could be directed toward more impactful work. When you don’t have a clear plan for your day, your schedule will inevitably be prioritised for you.

That’s why it’s so important to create intentional boundaries around checking email, that protect our capacity for deep thinking and creative scholarship. By establishing sustainable email practices, you can maintain effective workplace communication while preserving the mental space needed for your highest-value academic contributions.

Email is a system that delivers other people’s priorities to your attention.

Chris Brogan

Don’t start your day with email

The ability to consistently focus on something difficult, over extended periods of time, is correlated with successful outcomes. You should therefore aim to start your day with a few hours to work on the high-value tasks that are most important to you (and your organisation). Don’t start your day by opening your email client. This idea is relatively simple, but not easy in practice.

• Your attention is your most valuable resource. Paying attention to high-value tasks is one of the few things that can really drive your career forward; no-one got promoted because of their attentiveness to email.
• Starting your day by checking email may be the least productive thing you can do.
• By setting aside the first 2 hours for high-value tasks, you’re prioritising work that matters. Obviously, this work needs to align with your institutional priorities; your first two hours in the office shouldn’t be focused on writing your next novel.
• Turn off email notifications on your phone and computer. These notifications are designed to get your attention, which distracts you from what you should be doing. When you have a couple of email sessions scheduled (see the activity below), you know you’ll get to the messages soon enough.
• One reason that you may keep your email open all day is because you use your inbox as reminder of what you need to do; stop using email as a to do list (more on this in Lesson 2 – Processing email).
• When you stop using email as a to-do list, it makes sense to archive your messages when you’ve extracted the useful information from them. Using the search feature to find archived emails is probably more efficient than scrolling through your inbox anyway.

Creating head space isn’t just about finding more time in your day – it’s about developing sustainable habits that allow you to approach your most important work with clarity and focus. When you start your day with email, you’re immediately filling your mental bandwidth with other people’s requests and priorities. This cognitive load makes it harder to engage deeply with the kind of challenging, creative work that really matters for your academic career. By establishing clear boundaries around email and protecting your peak cognitive hours for high-value tasks, you’re not just managing your inbox better – you’re creating the mental space needed for meaningful scholarly work. This is what calm productivity looks like in practice: making deliberate choices about how you use your attention, rather than letting external demands dictate your day.

Different email contexts across roles

Academia encompasses many different roles, each with unique email management challenges. An early career researcher may need to balance supervisor communications with protected writing time for their first grant. Teaching-focused academics often face waves of student emails during assessment periods, requiring different strategies than research-intensive roles. Department chairs must handle constant administrative demands while maintaining space for strategic leadership.

The following examples provide suggestions for adapting the core principles of sustainable email management to your specific context, helping you create boundaries that work for your role while preserving time for meaningful academic work. While not exhaustive, they demonstrate the principle that checking email is context-dependant, and that we need different approaches to thinking about email management across our different roles.

Early career researcher

• Scenario: Writing your first major grant while collaborating across time zones
• Challenge: Balancing timely email responses to international collaborators , especially when feedback cycles span multiple time zones
• Suggestion: Schedule focused writing blocks during your peak hours, with dedicated collaboration windows that align with overlapping time zones. Use morning triage to identify which collaborator emails need same-day responses, then batch these into a single afternoon session

Teaching-focused academic

• Scenario: Managing final year dissertation supervision by email, alongside regular teaching duties
• Challenge: Providing timely email support to anxious students while maintaining enough uninterrupted time to give thorough feedback on drafts
• Suggestion: Establish clear “supervision hours” communicated in advance – e.g., quick queries handled in two 30-minute slots daily, with longer feedback sessions blocked out for draft reviews, using email templates to acknowledge receipt of drafts and set clear expectations for response times

Department chair

• Scenario: Leading a major departmental initiative while handling day-to-day administrative email
• Challenge: Carving out time for strategic planning and stakeholder engagement while staying responsive to urgent and important operational matters
• Suggestion: Create an email triage system with administrative support, using clear guidelines for which matters need your direct attention versus what can be delegated or batched

Building sustainable email practices

Effective email management isn’t just about efficiency – it’s about creating sustainable practices that support your scholarly work and well-being. Consider these principles as part of an overarching system of work:

Align with your natural rhythms

• Identify your peak cognitive hours for complex work
• Schedule email processing during lower-energy periods
• Build routines that work with your teaching and research patterns

Create boundaries that protect deep work

• Establish clear start and end times for email availability
• Communicate your email practices to colleagues respectfully
• Use autoresponders to set expectations when focusing on intensive projects

Maintain perspective

• Remember that email is a tool to support your work, not define it
• Most academic emails don’t require immediate response
• Your best contributions come from focused, intentional work

The key is developing practices you can maintain consistently. Rather than aiming for “inbox zero” or immediate responses, focus on creating sustainable routines that preserve your mental energy for meaningful academic work.

Pause and reflect

For better or worse, email has become the standard for organisational communication. So this is not a manifesto against email – it’s an invitation to be more intentional about how you engage with it. Just as you would schedule focused time for writing or research, your email sessions deserve the same thoughtful consideration.

Different academic roles demand different approaches, from teaching-focused academics needing regular student contact to researchers protecting long stretches of deep work. The key is making these choices deliberately, rather than defaulting to constant availability.

Consider your own context:

• When are your peak cognitive hours for complex work?
• What email patterns align with your role’s responsibilities?
• How can you create sustainable boundaries while remaining responsive?

Remember, the goal isn’t to disconnect completely – it’s to engage with email in a way that preserves your mental space for meaningful contributions.

Activity

I aim to structure my email sessions based on different engagement goals throughout the day. Use Adapt the suggested times below to fit your schedule and work patterns:

1. Morning triage (5 mins, before you get to the office)
   • Quick scan on your phone (assuming you have work email set up on your phone)
   • Flag urgent items (see next email session)
   • No detailed responses (which is why you check on your phone)
   • Clear non-essential items (Archive or Delete)
2. Urgent responses (30-45 mins, mid-morning)
   • Handle flagged items from morning triage
   • Convert emails to tasks
   • Respond to time-sensitive requests
   • Close email client when done (don’t work with your email open)
3. Main processing (60-90 mins, afternoon)
   • Process remaining emails
   • Complete email-related work tasks
   • Handle non-urgent responses
   • Archive processed items
4. End-of-day review (5 mins)
   • Final inbox check
   • Flag items for tomorrow (either Urgent or Mid-morning sessions)
   • Clear inbox before leaving the office
   • Disconnect until morning

Bonus tips

• Keep personal and work emails separate to reduce mental clutter and maintain clearer boundaries.
• Unsubscribe from all but the most high-value mailing lists; you have enough on your place without the regular guilt of not reading everything that lands in your inbox.

Key takeaways

• Your attention is your most valuable resource, and starting your day with email surrenders that resource to other people’s priorities. Instead, protect the first few hours of your workday for high-value tasks that advance your career and institutional goals.
• Email should be handled through structured, scheduled sessions throughout the day rather than constant checking. I suggest a specific rhythm: morning triage (5 mins), urgent responses (10:30, 30-60 mins), main processing (13:00, 2 hours), and end-of-day review (5 mins).
• Email notifications are a major source of distraction and should be turned off. When you have scheduled email sessions, you’ll get to messages soon enough. Additionally, your inbox shouldn’t serve as your to-do list – instead, convert emails into concrete tasks in your daily planning system.

Resources

• Newport, C. (2016). Deep work: Rules for focused success in a distracted world. Grand Central Publishing.
• Newport, C. (2021). A World without email: Reimagining work in an age of communication overload. Portfolio.

Do you have any experiences or insights that you’d like to share with others? What habits and routines have you implemented in your own practice, that have helped in this area? Do you have any questions about your specific context, that are not addressed in this lesson? Please leave a comment for other participants in the field below.