While I am on a productivity tear here, I will also recommend another of Merlin’s post at 43Folders called "Becoming An Email Ninja". It has a series of links to his classic email productivity posts for both receiving and composing emails. One of his most emphatic suggestions is to turn your "check for new email" preference to an hour. This helps to prevent you from living continually in your inbox with messages hitting you every minute. Email has truly become a ball and chain from a time management perspective since people can generate and fire off emails with little effort and, since it is so easy, don’t truly think through things like brevity, need for even sending it, replying to "all", and such. As usual, a good post from Merlin, which explains why he has over 100,000 daily readers of his feed.