Hit delete, ditch reply-all and other ways to manage your work emails

It's easy to feel swamped, but how do you decide what to keep and what takes priority? And should you be checking out of hours?

This is not impossible, according to Graham Allcott, the author of How to Be a Productivity Ninja, who runs workshops on keeping your inbox empty. "Get really comfortable with the delete button," he says, "and set your recycling bin not to empty regularly, so that if you accidentally delete things, you can retrieve them easily." The goal should be managing your attention, not your emails, he says, "therefore a key part of an 'inbox zero' system is to do whatever it takes to get your attention on to the most important and fulfilling stuff. If that means a few smaller things go awry once in a while, so be it. Your job isn't to do email well, it's to use email to do your work well."