I Freed Myself From Email's Grip

Earlier this year, I became tired of my usual morning ritual of spending hours catching up on email. So I did something drastic to take back control of my productivity.

I stopped using email most of the time. I quickly realized that the more messages you answer, the more messages you generate in return. It becomes a vicious cycle. By trying hard to stop the cycle, I cut the number of emails that I receive by 80% in a single week.

It’s not that I stopped communicating; I just communicated in different and more productive ways. Instead of responding individually to messages that arrived in my inbox, I started to use more social-networking tools, like instant messaging, blogs and wikis, among many others. I also started to use the telephone much more than I did before, which has the added advantage of being a more personal form of interaction.

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