I’m sure that by now most of the people on 43Folders are familiar with last summer’s notorious “emails hurt IQ more than [smoking] pot.” You’re not? Here’s the link http://www.cnn.com/2005/WORLD/europe/04/22/text.iq/.

With that as my inspiration, I try my best to put email on the backburner.

I probably get 100 emails a day. Of those, perhaps 10 matter and are actionable. I try to ignore every little ping while my timer is running and I’m working on the latest Next Action. But it doesn’t always work.

I am highly distractable (is that geneitc? or is that why we’re all looking to hack our personal suck), so often, I’ll stop what I’m doing and check the email. Usually, it’s some bulls&*t.

I have found and am wondering if others have found this as well that if I ignore email, and wait until the end of the day to tackle a particular task associated with said email, the task has uh, magically, been taken care of by someone else in my office that couldn’t figure out how to solve the issue in the first place.

This isn’t to say that I am slacking, in any way (I’m not), it’s just that I have priorities and need to take care of them first.

If it’s really, really a critical issue, I would expect a phone call or a visit from the person needing assistance.

I try to empty my email box every day - that is, filing emails into folders where they will live archived for future retrievals. (I wish I could do that with Gmail. I hate the long list format.) Those emails that I haven’t been able to get to either go into Waiting or Someday folders, while the Next Action emails will sit in my email box until I have completed the action.