It’s easy to fall into a reactionary trap of email every single day. It goes like this: You wake up, sit at your desk, answer emails and then wait for responses. You have effectively made waiting for email your job. You then spend the rest of your day mucking around while you wait for your phone to buzz or a notification of new emails.
Then you answer the emails and the cycle starts over. Email is not your job. Email is a communication tool that you need to effectively manage in order to do your job.
A simple trick to manage email is to only check mails once a day. This is hard for most people and at a push I’d say check mails twice a day for 30 minutes. Once in the morning and give attention to the urgent issues that come up. Then once in the afternoon for 30 minutes.
Don’t sit waiting for a response. Other people are doing their jobs, not waiting for emails all day long.