03 Email Is A Thief

Your inbox shouldn’t decide what gets your best hours. In this episode, we explore how email became a stealth time thief, why instant-response culture fuels anxiety and compulsive checking, and what it actually costs your focus to peek every few minutes. Instead of preaching “inbox zero” or pretending you can live without email, we walk through a practical, sustainable system that protects deep work while keeping you reliably responsive.

I'll break down the real drivers behind the addiction—the dopamine hit of notifications, the social pressure to reply fast, and the hidden tax of context switching that can wipe out hours. Then we rebuild your approach from the ground up with simple guardrails: choose one to three processing blocks per day, turn off notifications between them, and run each message through a clear decision path; delete, delegate, respond, or do. You’ll learn how to move longer replies into your task system, forward with ownership and deadlines, and stop rereading the same threads without action.

The payoff is immediate and compounding. By setting consistent response windows, you retrain clients and colleagues to expect thoughtful replies instead of instant reactions. You reclaim your peak energy for work that matters, reduce errors born of haste, and trade anxiety for agency. Email becomes a tool again not your boss, not your to-do list, and not a slot machine on your desk. If you’re ready to run your day instead of letting your inbox run it, press play and plan your first two email blocks.

Enjoyed the conversation? Follow the show, share this episode with a teammate who lives in their inbox, and leave a quick review to help more listeners take back their time.

Blinn Bates - BlinnBates.com

Woods & Bates, P.C. - woodsandbates.com

Chapters

• 1:00 Email As A Silent Time Thief
• 2:01 Expectations And The Dopamine Loop
• 2:37 The Cost Of Context Switching
• 4:01 From Reactive Inbox To Intentional Process
• 5:15 Set Blocks, Train Expectations, Take Back Time]

Transcript

SPEAKER_00: 0:30

Welcome back. Today I want to talk about email and email being a thief of our time. It's a silent one, but it steals your attention, your focus, and your most productive hours if we let it. I'm not an anti-email person. We're anti-email running your day. I actually am probably an anti-email person, but that's a personal opinion, and I don't think that campaign is going anywhere. So I want to challenge us today to stop constantly checking our email and instead come up with a process for processing our email. I think email is something that has arguably accelerated the speed of our businesses more than anything, probably in the last two to three decades. The only comparables I can think of would have been the advent of the fax machine and FedEx overnight delivery type services. But our email didn't just speed up our communication. I believe it also sped up our expectations for responses. So our clients, our colleagues, our customers now expect an almost immediate response when they send an email or receive an email and respond. And that expectation has created an environment where people check email compulsively. We always listening for that ding, want that hit of dopamine to see who has sent us an email. Email was created as a tool, but somewhere along the line, we have started working for our email. Most busy professionals are checking their email dozens, you know, if not hundreds of times per day. Some check it every few minutes just to see what's the next thing that came in. Just take a quick look. And what this does is it breaks your concentration. The science on this that I'm not going to get into too much says that if we break our concentration from something, it takes us anywhere from 12 to 20 minutes to recover our focus on what we were working on when we switch our context. So 10 small checks of email can cost us hours of productivity time. Email does trigger emotions. You know, it triggers anxiety, urgency, reactivity, things like that that are typically not good for us. So instead of choosing our priorities proactively, we are letting other people choose them for us through our inbox. This is a to-do list that other people are creating for us. So we want to shift away from that. We don't want to just be checking our email, scanning it, reacting, jumping from message to message, leaving dozens of things open. This leads to unfinished tasks, rereading, redoing the same things over and over again, and never actually knowing what's important. We're living in total reactive mode. So we want to use email just like we used to use the mail. This was a visual someone gave me one time that was very powerful. And it was if you walked out to the mailbox and you pulled your mail out and you sifted through it, you grabbed one piece of mail and walked back inside and did that over and over and over all day, people would think you were crazy. And that's what we do with our email. So instead of doing that, we want to process it. We want to set specific times each day, maybe one to three times a day, we're gonna process our email. So when we do that, if it's nine o'clock in the morning and we're gonna process our emails, we're gonna go through those and we're gonna make decisions. We're gonna delete them, delegate them, respond, or do them. And this type of processing is intentional. It's not emotional. It's returning that control back to us and it stops the email from stealing our entire day. I mean, how many of us have come into the office, sat down, opened up our email outlook account, and next thing we know it's six o'clock at night and we're late for dinner. And we get home and we feel like we've accomplished absolutely nothing. You know, that used to happen to me all the time. So I would encourage you to set up a simple system. Say, I'm gonna check my email twice a day, three times a day at these set intervals. And what this is gonna do for you is it's gonna protect your most productive hours. And it's gonna train others to expect when you're going to respond. Because when you immediately respond, you're setting the expectation for others of how you typically process your email, and that's immediate. You're going to shift from reacting to planning. And this isn't about being unavailable, this is about being intentional. This email is a tool, it is not your boss, it is not a command center, it is not urgent by default. And when you choose when you engage with it, the goal is not going to be to get rid of it, but it's going to be putting it in a category where it works for you. And when email starts running your day, you aren't running your day. So pick a couple times during the day, process your emails, turn off your notifications. That's a big one, and commit to not checking it in between those blocks. This will be difficult at first, but give it your best. You will get back some time in your day. And the more that you do this, I think you're going to want to do it more and more. So when you control your email, you're going to maximize your time. And when you maximize your time, you're going to elevate your life.