This is a friendly reminder to give yourself permission to step off the email hamster wheel. Your reward for getting through the wheel is just more wheel.1/5

First law of email hamster wheel thermodynamics: Real work is neither created nor destroyed with email. It's just work avoidance in another form. We look productive and superficially engaged while avoiding important work. 2/5

Second law of email hamster wheel thermodynamics: Even initially productive email discussions always move toward a disordered and non-useful state. Reply all is a particularly expedient move toward entropy. 3/5

Third law of email hamster wheel thermodynamics: Inbox zero is theoretically achievable with perfectly logical and ordered email behavior from yourself and/or others. Such conditions are impossible to achieve in practice. Inbox zero is a state of mind. Take a break. 4/5

Apologies in advance to all the chemists out there for the thermodynamics analogy. It's just a joke - don't @ me with a peer review because I'm just a social scientist out here doing my best. 5/5