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Too many e-mails? Tame your inbox by thinking like a monkey

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.

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.