What if you choose not to look at our inboxes every five minutes?

Here are two quotes that have profoundly affected the way I think about my email:

Your inbox is a to-do list written by someone else.

Tom Chatwin

One of [email’s] overlooked disadvantages [is that] it is used for everything.

Daniel Levitin

I’m sure that my colleagues are a bit tired of hearing that first quote, which I will happily drop into practically any conversation concerning workplace productivity. But I keep doing it because most people I do tell will break out into a nervous smile and laugh, because it’s the truth about their inbox and they’ve never thought about it that way.

Granted, Chatwin’s observation isn’t perfect. My inbox is full of “friendly fire” to-do list items, self-initiated items that have bounced back in my direction after I’d directed them out into the world. Excepting those, my inbox is, indeed, filled with things that other people would like me to do for them.

If your preference is to “self-direct” your workload—deciding the when and how of the what—then your inbox is generally an awful place to hang out. Given my desire to manage my own productivity and not succumb to the whims of others’ requests, I try to spend as little time as possible in my inbox, going so far as to keep Outlook closed with all desktop notifications turned off.

When I mentioned this tactic to colleagues, I got a few wide-eyed stares and nervous smiles. He can’t be serious, right? I thought having Outlook open all day was practically a job requirement!

There’s an unspoken affliction I think we all suffer when it comes to our inboxes: we never know when an important email might appear. The psychological pull of the potential import is what keeps our eyes glued to the space where a bright, shiny, and bold message will appear. This attitude—what you might consider “workplace FOMO”—is doing us no favors when it comes to actually getting work done.

Of course, some people’s work is their email, an unfortunate situation I have no solution for. But, for the rest of us, we don’t need to work with our inboxes constantly open. That’s not what productivity looks like.