11 What can you do to defend yourself from email?

Here’s a pretty safe assumption to make: you probably feel like you’re inundated with email, don’t you? Building up, it is always nagging you to check it. You put up spam filters and create sorting systems, but it’s never quite enough. And that’s because the big problems with email are not just technical – they're psychological. If we can understand these we'll all be a bit better prepared to manage email, rather than let it manage us. For this psychological self-defence course, we're going to cover very briefly three fundamental aspects of human reasoning. These are features built into how the human mind works. If you know about them, you can watch out for them and – most importantly – catch yourself when one of these tendencies is leading you astray. First up is reciprocity – our tendency to want to return like for like, whether that is a smile for a smile or a blow for a blow. A part of us loves getting email – it provides basic proof that we're part of society (and often more – it’s concrete evidence that someone wants to talk to us, invite us out, or tell us something). Secondly, our animal brains use some simple rules for processing rewards. The most fundamental of these rules is the so called Law of Effect, which simply states that if something is followed by a reward, then animals tend to increase the frequency with which they do it.  Thirdly, typerbolic discounting is another feature of how we're wired to think about rewards. Discounting is the diminishing value of rewards as they get further away in time. It's the thing that means that being offered 100 euros today is far more exciting than being offered 100 euros in ten years time. That discounting is hyperbolic means a reward that is very close gets drastically more attractive.