This is an IHeart podcast.

Good morning. This is Laura.

Welcome to the Before Breakfast podcast.

Today's tip is about how to spend less time on email.

Email is an incredibly useful tool.

I started my career working as a journalist, and I learned to report

before a lot of people had access to email. It was a very different experience. Trying to

get people on the phone was often tough. Sources would call you back while you were on the

phone with someone else, so there was a lot of phone tag. And since you often had to go through

gatekeepers to get people on the phone,

it was tempting to keep calling the same people you knew would talk with you. Email has opened this all up.

Everyone is more accessible. This is awesome in some ways, and it's also a problem in some other ways.

Accessibility means anyone can email anyone,

anywhere in the world, at any time. And so we do. I don't have to tell you that email overload

is the cause of an incredible amount of workplace stress. People feel constantly behind.

In my time management fable, Juliet's School of Possibilities,

in one scene Riley notes that the number of unread messages in her inbox

appears to be rising like seconds on a stopwatch.

People have told me that reading that scene has made them feel incredibly anxious.

So I wanted to share a strategy that one before breakfast listener

wrote in to tell me was working for her. She's a project management consultant working for global

clients. That means that I can receive emails at all hours of the day, she writes. I often wake up in the

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