I think email stall is somewhat of a symptom of the larger problem of people checking their email when they shouldn’t – most likely too frequently or when they don’t have time to do anything with the information from the messages. So, instead of actually processing email, they’re kind of poking at email, which makes them have to do it again.

So I’d recommend shortening the frequency of checking email as much as possible and only checking it with the intent to process it. And shutting the auto-notifiers off, too.

I can’t tell you how many times I used to “Mark as Unread” messages that I didn’t want to deal with – that sucked and I realized that I never stopped doing it.

Recently, I’ve forced myself to actually *do* something when I open a particular email and it has single-handedly helped me regain control of my inbox.

The 2 minute rule is really designed for when there’s some volume of messages in your inbox. If you have 15 actionable messages and it takes under 2 minutes to deal with them then that’s reasonable. But if it took 15 minutes then it might start compromising the rest of your activities.

As such, I would recommend taking a quick look at the subjects to “see what’s on your plate” and depending on how much time you have decide if you can afford 2, 10, or 15 minutes. I still would recommend dealing with the 10 or 15 minute tasks afterwards since I think we get in a FLOW with our activities and 15 minutes doing something else can actually slow down the email processing flow. Email processing is all about rhythm and you don’t want to chance distraction (whenever possible).

This sometimes takes longer than the stated two minutes in GTD, but it works for me and I don’t have to deal with it again.