The issue does not lie in the few emails you get every day, but the distraction which accompanies it. There are basically two modes of email usage: 1. Pushed:

The issue does not lie in the few emails you get every day, but the distraction which accompanies it. There are basically two modes of email usage: 1. Pushed: Email gets pushed to your email client or mobile phone, followed by a audio visual indicator showing the amount of messages received, sometimes also a snippet of the email. 2. Pulled: You manually go to gmail.com to check whether new email arrived. The push-mode is counter productive because it breaks your train of thought. Assuming your 20 emails arrive evenly distributed over an eight hour work day, that's one email every 24 minutes. From my experience, it takes roughly 30minutes to get the mind to focus on any moderately complex problem (especially programming). So there goes your work day. The pull mode can be highly addictive: On some occasions, checking your email account is rewarded with a non-empty inbox (inbox zero people will think you're nuts), other times your inbox is empty and you don't get any reward. This creates a reinforcement which is variable in amount (emails received) and interval (when and whether you receive some) which psychologists call a variable interval reinforcement schedule and is found to be highly addictive. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reinforcement http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reinforcement) Point is, the cost of email is more than just the time required to answer the 20 emails. That is usually not the problem, unless you're a VC :-)