You need to spend time thinking about strategic topics without being distracted all the time by low-priority information inflow.
To be effective, you need to be working on your business. You can't afford to spend too much time on operational matters. E-mail is a convenient tool for senders but, at the same time, it is often a burden for recipients.
Regain four hours of your day
In order to reclaim a considerable portion of your working day, you need do only one thing: treat e-mail as a task in itself. The basic idea is that if you are a busy manager, many people demand a portion of your time and most of these requests come in the form of an e-mail.
Therefore, your interaction with e-mail should become a scheduled event. It is entirely up to you how frequently you allow yourself to check, read and answer emails during the day. It may be a good idea to schedule just two blocks of 90 minutes per day. The first session should come before lunch and the second one late in the afternoon. This is the advice in an article on the cfo.com website.
If it is important, they will find a way
If you are expecting an important message, check around the time you anticipate it might arrive and then leave your mailbox again. For the rest of the day, open e-mail only if you need to look something up or send a message.
People will often use e-mail for relatively low-priority matters. But if you follow the afore-mentioned advice, they will soon learn to e-mail only actionable information. If they need to discuss critical or time-sensitive items, they will visit you personally or give you a call.
-jk-