Sending and scanning emails might make you feel like you're accomplishing a lot — but the best employees know their time is better spent elsewhere.
Charles Duhigg, a New York Times journalist who researched the topic of productivity extensively for his 2016 book, "Smarter Faster Better," says he measures his daily productivity by the number of emails he sends. The fewer, the better.
In an interview for the Peak Work Performance Summit, Duhigg told psychologist Ron Friedman, "You can be busy all day long and never really be productive." He added: "You and I know that we can spend an entire day replying to emails and getting to 'inbox zero,' feeling like we worked every single minute and really not getting anything important done. You could do that your entire life."
Similarly, time-management expert Laura Vanderkam wrote in her 2015 book, "I Know How She Does It": "[Y]ou will never reach the bottom of your inbox. Better to realize that anything you haven't gotten to after a week or so will have either gone away or been thrust back upon you by follow-up messages or calls."