Emergent scholarship

Course Lessons

Checking email

9 min read

Lesson overview

Objective: Establish a fixed routine for checking email

Summary: Email management is crucial for academics trying to protect their most valuable resource: their attention. Starting your day with email surrenders your cognitive energy to other people’s priorities, undermining your ability to focus on high-value academic work. Instead, aim to create intentional boundaries around email, treating it as a tool that supports your work rather than something that dictates your schedule.

Key habits:

  • Don’t check email first thing: Reserve your morning hours for high-value tasks
  • Schedule specific times for email: e.g. morning triage, mid-morning urgent replies, afternoon processing
  • Turn off notifications: You’ll get to your messages during scheduled email sessions
  • End each day with a quick inbox review: Then disconnect until tomorrow

Introduction

Email is a system that delivers other people’s priorities to your attention.

Chris Brogan

Email is a deceptive distraction: it feels productive but often pulls us away from our most meaningful work. Like many academics, you’re probably constantly juggling competing priorities - from research projects and teaching preparation to administrative duties and student support. When faced with an unstructured day, your inbox provides a ready-made list of tasks, making it particularly tempting to start there.

This is why so many of us begin our day by checking email, letting other people’s priorities dictate our schedule. Each message demands attention, fragmenting our focus and consuming mental bandwidth that could be directed toward more impactful work. When you don’t have a clear plan for your day, your schedule will inevitably be prioritised for you through your inbox.

That’s why it’s so important to create intentional boundaries around checking email, that protect our capacity for deep thinking and creative scholarship. By establishing sustainable email practices, you can maintain effective workplace communication while preserving space for the more meaningful work that drives you.

Don’t start your day with email

The foundation of a productive academic career lies in your ability to sustain deep focus on challenging work over long periods. By starting your workday with email, you’re immediately surrendering this crucial focus time. While the principle is straightforward – don’t open your email first thing – implementing it requires both conviction and practical strategies.

Your cognitive bandwidth is a finite resource that directly impacts your scholarly output. Here’s why protecting it from early-morning email matters:

  • Focused attention on complex tasks is what drives academic excellence - whether that’s refining research methodologies, developing innovative teaching approaches, or advancing key institutional initiatives. Opening your inbox first thing redirects this precious resource toward others’ agendas
  • The first hours of your day typically offer your sharpest thinking and most sustained concentration. Using this time for email means trading your peak performance hours for routine communication tasks that could be handled just as effectively later
  • Setting aside the first two hours for deep work sends a powerful message about your priorities, both to yourself and others. This time should be dedicated to the kind of substantive work that advances your academic mission and institutional contributions
  • Email notifications fragment your attention even when you’re not actively checking messages. Disable these interruptions on all your devices - when you establish regular email checking times, you’ll address important messages while preserving your focus

Many academics keep their email constantly open because their inbox serves as a task management system. This practice creates a reactive workday where other people’s requests drive your schedule. Instead, extract actionable items from emails and incorporate them into your broader planning system.

The transition away from email-first mornings often feels uncomfortable initially. We’ve been conditioned to equate responsiveness with responsibility. But by thoughtfully protecting your most productive hours, you’re actually maximising your contribution to your academic community. When you do turn to email later in the day, you’ll bring more clarity and purpose to your communications, having already advanced your most important work.

Email strategies across different roles

Academia encompasses many different roles, each with unique email management challenges. An early career researcher may need to balance supervisor communications with protected writing time for their first grant. Teaching-focused academics often face waves of student emails during assessment periods, requiring different strategies than research-intensive roles. Department chairs must handle constant administrative demands while maintaining space for strategic leadership.

The following examples provide suggestions for adapting the core principles of sustainable email management to different academic contexts, demonstrating how to create boundaries that work for different roles while also preserving time for meaningful academic work.

Building sustainable email practices

Effective email management isn’t just about efficiency - it’s about creating sustainable practices that support your scholarly work and well-being. Consider these principles as part of an overarching system of work:

Align with your natural rhythms:

  • Identify your peak cognitive hours for complex work
  • Schedule email processing during lower-energy periods
  • Build routines that work with your teaching and research patterns

Create boundaries that protect deep work:

  • Establish clear start and end times for email availability
  • Communicate your email practices to colleagues respectfully
  • Use autoresponders to set expectations when focusing on intensive projects

Maintain perspective:

  • Remember that email is a tool to support your work, not define it
  • Most academic emails don’t require immediate response
  • Your best contributions come from focused, intentional work

The key is developing practices you can maintain consistently. Rather than aiming for “inbox zero” or immediate responses, focus on creating sustainable routines that preserve your mental energy for meaningful academic work.

Download the template

Pause and reflect

For better or worse, email has become the standard for organisational communication. So this is not a manifesto against email - it’s an invitation to be more intentional about how you engage with it. Just as you would schedule focused time for writing or research, your email sessions deserve the same thoughtful consideration.

Different academic roles demand different approaches, from teaching-focused academics needing regular student contact to researchers protecting long stretches of deep work. The key is making these choices deliberately, rather than defaulting to constant availability.

Consider your own context:

  • When are your peak cognitive hours for complex work?
  • What email patterns align with your role’s responsibilities?
  • How can you create sustainable boundaries while remaining responsive?

Remember, the goal isn’t to disconnect completely - it’s to engage with email in a way that preserves your mental space for meaningful contributions.

Activity

Key takeaways

  • Protect your attention: Your attention is your most valuable resource, and starting your day with email surrenders that resource to other people’s priorities. Instead, protect the first few hours of your workday for high-value tasks that advance your career and institutional goals.

  • Schedule email sessions: Work with email through structured, scheduled sessions throughout the day rather than constant checking. Aim for a consistent rhythm: morning triage (5 mins), urgent responses (10:30, 30-60 mins), main processing (13:00, 2 hours), and end-of-day review (5 mins).

  • Turn off notifications: Email notifications are a major source of distraction and should be turned off. When you have scheduled email sessions, you’ll get to messages soon enough.

  • Email isn’t a to-do list: Your inbox shouldn’t serve as your to-do list - instead, convert emails into concrete tasks in your daily planning system.

Resources

  • Newport, C. (2016). Deep work: Rules for focused success in a distracted world. Grand Central Publishing.
  • Newport, C. (2021). A World without email: Reimagining work in an age of communication overload. Portfolio.

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