Tomorrow, I'd like to suggest you do something different. Before you open your email client (and let's face it, you probably scanned email when you woke up anyway, right?), look at your To Do list and do the most-important, most-complex and nastiest thing on there. Brian Tracy calls this Eating Your Frog, based on the Mark Twain saying "Eat a live frog every morning, and nothing worse will happen to you the rest of the day." Steven Covey calls it doing First Things First.
Depending on the task, this will mean that by about 9.00am you will have nailed one of your Must Dos. You should have about 3-5 of these each day. And it'll have been the thorniest, most-urgent one. Probably one of the 20% which makes 80% of the difference. You'll feel a sense of accomplishment and start the day with forward momentum, while most others are still wading through email triage. It also means you are tackling the most-demanding issues when you have the most energy and focus. This yields better results compared to procrastinating and leaving all the tough issues to the end of day.
If you make a habit of this, you will a) make sure you check off all those important tasks which only you can do, b) do them better, c) start to break your email addiction and d) be in control of your Must Dos rather than acting on whatever seems to be on fire at the start of the day.
That's got to be better than tackling your Inbox.
