Inboxes have a way of eating entire mornings without producing much of value. Most of that time isn’t spent on hard decisions — it’s spent re-reading the same message three times, half-answering it, and coming back to finish the thought later. The fix is a rule borrowed from productivity research: if a response takes less than two minutes to write, write it immediately. If it takes longer, it doesn’t belong in the inbox at all — it belongs on a task list with an actual time block.

The two-minute line matters because it’s short enough to prevent procrastination and long enough to cover most routine replies: confirming a meeting, answering a factual question, forwarding a document with a one-line note. These are exactly the messages that clutter an inbox when they’re deferred, because “I’ll answer that later” usually means answering it three or four times — reading it again each time it resurfaces.

Anything that requires real thought — a pricing decision, a difficult client conversation, a proposal — should get pulled out of the inbox and onto a calendar. Email is a poor environment for decisions that deserve focus, since it’s also where every other unrelated demand on your attention happens to be sitting.

A useful habit: process email in two or three dedicated blocks a day, rather than reactively throughout it. During each block, apply the two-minute rule ruthlessly — answer what’s quick, and move everything else to where real work gets scheduled.

None of this requires new software or a productivity system with a name. It requires a single decision rule, applied consistently, that keeps small tasks from disguising themselves as ongoing work. The entrepreneurs who feel like they’re drowning in email are rarely dealing with more messages than everyone else — they’re just letting two-minute tasks and two-hour tasks compete for the same block of attention