You know how inbox-zero is this weird, elusive thing? It's tough to clear all of your email and start over. I don’t like to get sucked into my Inboxes (business and personal) so I adopted by turning off email notifications when I’m in focus-mode (Apple) and other times I check my email twice per hour.

It is really hard for us to embrace that, rarely if ever, an email will bring everything to a full stop; all of my contacts have my cell number - if it’s an emergency, text me. My kids know that a text with just 911 means I need to call them right away.

Here are two brilliant hacks I learned from Daniel Pink: (1) Don’t check your email in the morning (especially early in the morning) when many of us are most productive. But if you must, reply and scheduled the outbound email to go out a few hours later. (2) Don’t check emails on the weekend, but if fall-off -the-Inbox-wagon, schedule your reply to go out on Monday.