I used to be pretty into these kinds of things (typical case of "lifehacking to a point where it becomes a new job"), but eventually, only two things helped:
1) Discipline
2) Relentless Filtering
Any reasonably advanced mail app worth its salt has implemented #2. Every time an email comes in that you open and find that it's wasting your time and isn't actionable or necessary in any way, create a filter that would have moved it into a "Noise" folder. (AND "mark as read", so it's not another task to mark them yourself!)
After doing this for a number of years, this now filters about 10 to 20 emails every day, so I guess it's saving me about half an hour of my time (and considerable frustration and/or self loathing).
(The filter rules in Thunderbird are somewhere around 200 email addresses, snippets of texts in the header or body of an email. I actually had to make a second filter since the filter edit UI in thunderbird started to be sluggish after a hundred or so.)
Should you ever wonder whether you're missing out on something, just check the Noise folder. Most of the time, the answer is a resounding: Nooooope.
Of course, the only thing that really helps is discipline. The one thing that no app in the world can actually replace.
The sooner you start working on your discipline instead of putting that off by band-aiding yet another slightly unwelcome minor character trait with an app, the better.
If a simple filter (or 100 filters) are sufficient then shouldn't you ask yourself why are you receiving these emails?
Why not unsubscribe from the mailing list; or have your team document their status in a project tracker instead of CCing half the company on emails?
Not that I don't appreciate your approach. I have my mail client provide no mail notifications unless the email is from my Important list of contacts. So my inbox builds up until I am ready to spend time on it.
Sometimes you don't have control over a subscription (semi-spam), other times it makes sense to at least have them archived "just in case".
The bottom line is: I have decided that whenever I run into a "this is wasting my time" situation, there is a single action (that takes seconds to complete) to solve it.
Also - Trying to compete with professional people trying to get my attention is a losing game - I just filter and they never find out they won part of the arms race.
Your advice sounds reasonable, but closing my Gmail browser window is not an option for me. Most of my tasks require sending emails or searching for old ones, so I use Gmail frequently. And every time I see an email in my inbox, I find it hard to resist opening and replying to it.
I've been using Inbox Pause since I discovered it at the start of last month (I use Baydin's Boomerang tool too). I now go through emails twice a day. This has several advantages: (i) I go through my inbox with more urgency, because my mindset seems to be different when I have many emails to process—especially because I start the final session about 30 minutes before leaving work. (ii) Long discussion threads appear all in one go, rather than being "drip-fed" to me. (iii) It's impossible to receive more than two replies from me in one day – which I'm happy with, because anything that requires more than two replies may be more efficiently handled with a phone call. Either way, it helps me to spend more time doing my more-important tasks.
As an alternative you could use a mail client and disable fetching mails every few minutes, so you are still able to send mails without getting new ones.
Oh what a surprise! It looks like just a backward time travel to the world where we used mail client applications with POP3 mail servers. You have time to read emails, you open your mail client, push "Get new messages" and voila! you read your mail!
Actually it's often when you find that old good simple approaches are just more comfortable for many people than the new shiny technologies that disturb/annoy you all the time.
I'm sorry, am I missing something? Is it really that hard to just turn off your mail app during periods of in-depth work, and then turn it back on when you want to spend some time with your inbox?
1) Discipline
2) Relentless Filtering
Any reasonably advanced mail app worth its salt has implemented #2. Every time an email comes in that you open and find that it's wasting your time and isn't actionable or necessary in any way, create a filter that would have moved it into a "Noise" folder. (AND "mark as read", so it's not another task to mark them yourself!)
After doing this for a number of years, this now filters about 10 to 20 emails every day, so I guess it's saving me about half an hour of my time (and considerable frustration and/or self loathing).
(The filter rules in Thunderbird are somewhere around 200 email addresses, snippets of texts in the header or body of an email. I actually had to make a second filter since the filter edit UI in thunderbird started to be sluggish after a hundred or so.)
Should you ever wonder whether you're missing out on something, just check the Noise folder. Most of the time, the answer is a resounding: Nooooope.
Of course, the only thing that really helps is discipline. The one thing that no app in the world can actually replace.
The sooner you start working on your discipline instead of putting that off by band-aiding yet another slightly unwelcome minor character trait with an app, the better.