One thing to keep in mind: email is not instant communication; email is instant ONE WAY communication. Have you ever had a colleague who sent you an email, then called you to make sure you got the email? How likely are you to want to help this person?

I’m going to suggest something really radical: check your email once a day.

Seriously.

If you are like most people and check your email every few minutes, or have some sort of alert system to tell you when you have a new email, stop it. You are splitting your focus and becoming inefficient.

Now, of course, if you are waiting for an answer about some urgent issue that you need to know right now, that’s a totally different subject. But most of us do not have that problem. We have just created email as a sort of instant messenger, in that we expect people to immediately jump and answer
our questions, just as if they had called us on the phone. (You don’t answer the phone every time it rings, do you?)

–Rob