Before I get into full rant mode, please can I clarify something: this is a case of ‘physician heal thyself’, as much of what I’ve identified as email pet hates are things I’ve been guilty of and am still working on. But when I hear people saying they’re getting over 300 emails a day, I worry about it - and them. What’s to be done?

It’s not that long ago that we talked about giving an email the ‘two minute test’: in other words, if you could deal with it in two minutes or less, get on with it; if not file it and make a date/time to deal with it later. So let’s say that our 300-a-day person gives each email no more than 2 minutes - sure, they’ll delete a lot (hopefully!), but there will be others that take longer, so we let’s try this rough average - that’s 600 minutes. Which equals… ten hours. Maybe they’re an email ninja master, and can tear through the stuff at a ferocious average of 1 minute each - that’s 300 minutes, or five hours. It’s still a sizeable chunk of time, and chances are, not all of it productive because of poor use of the medium.