“Don’t check your email for the first two to three hours,” says Mr Hector Hughes, co-founder of Unplugged, off-grid cabins set in nature. It helps if your alarm clock isn’t your phone. Go for a walk instead.

“Only send emails at your desk,” Hughes says. Otherwise just firing off a few messages in dead time quickly becomes in down time, on walks…

“Prioritise your deep work and fit emails around that, rather than the other way round,” says Ms Alicia Navarro, founder of virtual co-working platform Flown. Sending emails might feel like doing something, but if that’s all you get done all day, then you won’t feel great.

Email only at set intervals, as infrequently as you can get away with. (Research shows that batching emails makes neurotics more stressed, but then what doesn’t?) Keep your policy quiet, though, writes Newport: advertising it with an auto-reply is apt to cause correspondents consternation. An impersonal email address – eg, contact@example.com – can manage expectations of your responsiveness more subtly.

Set up labels to automatically move automated updates, newsletters, invoices and the like, Hughes says. That way, you can concentrate on the important stuff.

To avoid getting distracted from the email you’re writing by the other emails piling up, Hughes recommends Inbox When Ready, a Gmail browser extension that hides your inbox until you’re, well, ready. It even locks it away until your next scheduled check.

“Outsource as much as you can to AI or human assistants,” Dr Chamorro-Premuzic says. (Navarro is “obsessed” with Sanebox.) Or, as Newport writes, be your own assistant: allocate time for “specialist” and “support” work – ie, genuine work and admin – respectively. Use separate email addresses and/or locations, eg, home for specialist and office for support or vice versa.

By letting your inbox become your to-do list, you’re effectively – or ineffectively – outsourcing the management of your time to other people, Navarro says. While you can’t ignore emails from your actual manager, Newport writes that you can quantify the time you spend on your inbox and other such shallow work, then respectfully ask if some of your limited “attention budget” mightn’t be better spent elsewhere.

Keep your emails “short and sweet”, Dr Chamorro-Premuzic says. One guideline is five sentences – any more and this email should be a conversation, meeting or small novel.

Navarro minimises the back-and-forth of arranging meetings by sending a link from Calendly, which lets the other party simply pick a time that works for both you and them. (Newport uses a similar service, Acuity, and periodically a part-time human assistant via Upwork.)

Any result you repeat more than 30 times a year is, writes Newport, probably worth the initial effort of turning into an automatic process in order to eliminate all future email chatter, with “well-defined phases”, “signalling” for who needs to do what when and “clear channels” for resources. It could be as simple as set times or shared documents.

If she can’t reply to all emails, Navarro invites correspondents to WhatsApp a voice note to which she can respond in kind while walking. You can also use your phone to – get this – speak to people.

“Don’t waste time replying to irrelevant emails,” Dr Chamorro-Premuzic says. “Most people give up after a while.”

Email begets email. Send and ye shall receive.

To reduce non-urgent email requests, keep what academics such as Newport call “office hours”: a period of, say, an hour a day, or a couple of hours once or twice a week, when you’re reachable in person, by phone or on instant messenger.

If you message outside traditional office hours – before 9.00am or after 5.00pm – or in different time zones, then schedule your send time. “Don’t let your emails take over the lives of others,” Hughes says.

Email hacks can only go so far without addressing the underlying workflow, writes Newport. He’s one of an increasing number of converts to digital task board tools such as Trello, Flow and Asana that, unlike sprawling inboxes, focus communication, information and attention on the single task in hand. Whatever alternative solution you choose or devise, Newport’s two key principles are to minimise “mid-task context switches” – eg, from work to talking about work and back – and communication overload.

Digitally detox at least one day a week, even if just for a few hours. “Switch your phone off,” Hughes says. “Or leave it at home while you go out for a walk or for dinner.”

If you want your brain to shut down at bedtime, don’t check your inbox just before. “It’s like trying to park a car that’s going 70mph,” Hughes says. Leave your phone overnight in another room from where you recharge yourself, then set your alarm clock. You did buy one?