Reduce Your Stress Around Email

The average employee gets over 120 emails a day. Most CEOs receive 300+. How can you cope with that daily deluge without it eating your focus alive?

Every email sitting unread in your inbox is what psychologists call an open loop, an unfinished task your brain keeps quietly tracking in the background. That background tracking is real cognitive load, not just a feeling. It is part of why a full inbox feels heavier than the actual work inside it. Closing those loops, not just answering messages, is what actually restores focus.

Here are a few tips from my friend Dianna Booher, whose new book Faster, Fewer, Better Emails came out this week.

What to do:

1. Read each email only once and either delete, put into action, reply or send to right person.
2. Ask coworkers not to cc all.
3. Don’t prolong responses with personal commentary that is meaningless. Women often try to build relationships with email; this is not the place.
4. Acknowledge receipt and respond with a plan: “I will get that report to you after I hear from Tom; you will have it by 3:00pm.”
5. Bow out after introductions.
6. Don’t forward jokes, stories, etc. We all have enough distractions.
7. Unsubscribe to ezines.
8. Turn off alerts.

A tip from me:
9. Only check email 4-5 times a day. First thing when you start work, before lunch, after lunch, mind-day and at end of day. Don’t take it home and don’t read it before bed, it will wreak havoc with your sleep. You train people how to expect your response. If you respond immediately, they will always expect it.

You can handle your email in a way that works for you. Try these techniques and let me know if they helped!

Why “Read It Once” Actually Works

Tip 1 works for a reason beyond efficiency. Leaving a message half read, flagged for later, or reopened three times keeps that open loop active in your mind long after you have moved on to something else. This is the same mechanism behind an unfinished to-do list. It is not fully about the task itself, it is about the incompletion.

The fix is the same one that works for a cluttered desk or a never-ending task list: write down only what genuinely needs to happen today, act on it fully, and let the rest wait on a separate list rather than living half-open in your inbox. A daily list you can actually complete, rather than one that stretches on forever, is what makes a return to full inbox feel manageable instead of draining.

Protecting Focus Is a Boundary, Not a Personality Trait

Tip 9, checking email on a schedule instead of reactively, is a boundary decision, and boundaries protect your highest-value thinking time. Every message you answer the instant it arrives teaches the sender to expect instant answers going forward. Every checked-in moment that is not genuinely urgent is time pulled from decisions that actually require your full attention.

The strongest version of this habit is not just about answering fewer emails. It is about protecting the hours where your best thinking happens, and being deliberate about when you let interruptions in.

If email is one symptom of a broader pattern, always reachable, never fully caught up, that pattern usually shows up elsewhere too. The Focus element of the Leadership Resilience System addresses exactly that: protecting attention from urgent-but-unimportant demands. For more real-time tools, see Stress Management Strategies, or explore how to prevent burnout before constant reactivity becomes the norm.