One of the very first lectures I give each year to new MBA students is about time management.

By the time they arrive in my classroom, they are two days into the fall term, and I can already see that some of them are barely keeping their heads above water.

I see this lecture as both a reality check and a breath of fresh air. They will never get everything done, but they can get the important things done.

Simply giving them permission to take control of their priorities — focusing on the “management” portion of time management — seems to lift some of the tension from the room.

Email in particular is a major contributor to employees’ perceptions of feeling stressed or overwhelmed, according to a 2011 study.

In their research, the authors concluded that the email inbox itself has become a symbol of stress and overload. Combine that with a 2012 McKinsey report that found employees spend approximately 28% of their time in the office responding to, reading, or composing emails.

The average person checks his or her email upwards of seventy times per day, and on the high end that number approaches 350 times!

To read more of the original article, go to Harvard Business Review.