So one day I stopped.
Not forever, but for that day. I did anything but respond to emails. Something interesting happened: people with real fires called me, and those were worked out. And the next day, when I went to look at my email, I started responding with: “Is this issue resolved now?”
Almost every email had been resolved in less than 24 hours — often less than an hour. Not by me, but by the people I selected to handle the problems in the first place. It wasn’t that they didn’t need me, it’s that they didn’t need me as much as they, or I, thought they did.
It’s never bad to let someone else fix the problems so you can work in the Not-Urgent/Important quadrant.
Source: Taking Focus Time As a Manager