I very much like this.

Reg­u­lar read­ers of acid­labs will know we’re fans of Get­ting Things Done. Eric Mack extends David’s Two Minute Rule to email — if the email will take more than two min­utes to reply to, just delete it.

Now, this is obvi­ously an idea that needs a lit­tle tweak­ing. Some­times you get emails that are crit­i­cal that require a response which needs to take more than two min­utes to gen­er­ate. That said, take a look at your Inbox. How many unread/​unanswered emails are there? What per­cent­age of them could you deal with in less than two min­utes? How many of the ones that would take more than two min­utes should have been bro­ken down into smaller chunks of achiev­able, next action-​​based infor­ma­tion? I’d ven­ture than the answers, in order, are: A num­ber between 10 and 100, more than 80 per cent, all of them.

Go ahead. Kill the email that will take more than two min­utes to answer. If it’s really impor­tant, the sender will call or email again. When they do, advise them of your pol­icy and get them to chunk their email down.