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Too many e-mails? Tame your inbox by thinking like a monkey
How fast you reply – and whether you respond at all – is about who is more powerful than whom.
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Frustration with too many e-mails usually arises, we assume, because they take more time than we have.
PHOTO ILLUSTRATION: UNSPLASH
F.D. Flam
If you’re confronting an endless string of unread e-mails after a long weekend or summer vacation, try thinking of responding as a game. A status game.
Since reading the 2012 book Games Primates Play, by University of Chicago behavioural scientist Dario Maestripieri, I’ve never looked at my inbox the same way. E-mail, writes Professor Maestripieri, is governed by the rules of dominance hierarchy, which is central to the games we social primates are wired to play.
