The morning I stopped checking email first
One swap, no app to install, and the most under-discussed productivity win I have ever made.
On a Tuesday in January I sat down at my desk, opened the mail app on reflex, and then closed it without reading anything. I had not planned to. I have not gone back to the old order since.
The swap#
For years my morning was: coffee, mail, then work. The mail step was an average of forty minutes. It was forty minutes of responding to other people's mornings before I had a chance to have my own.
The new order is: coffee, work, then mail. Mail at 11am, after the first deep block. The first thing I do is the thing I decided last night, not the thing someone emailed me overnight.
What happens to the mail#
It waits. The world has not, in five months, ended because I responded at 11am instead of 8am. Two real urgent things came up. Both were also on Slack. Both were also a phone call.
The fear of being slow on mail was the fear that my mornings were owed to the inbox. They were not.
What I gained#
The first deep block of the day, which used to be sometimes 11am, sometimes 2pm, depending on the inbox. Now it is always 8am. That consistency is worth more than the forty minutes itself.