Turning off auto-email checks would probably make me a lot more productive. Juha Haataja writes:
Jeremy Zawodny
writes: “E-mail is not real-time. It never has been. Why do you assume
that your messages and received and read within 20 seconds? Some people
actually work.” — This is a good point. You don’t need to be
available immediately! There is a recent report
(in PDF) about the cost of e-mail interruption: “The time it takes the
average employee to recover from an email interrupt and to return to
their work at the same work rate at which they left it, is on average
64 seconds.” Thus, if you receive 50 e-mails in a day, you might lose
almost on hour of productive time. Thus, setting in your mail program
the interval between e-mail checks to one hour is a good tactic, as is
disabling all notifications of received e-mail.