You all reflect my concerns!
I do think that lots of emails in some schools are duplicates of what has been spoken about verbally – the amount of time staff would send me an email, and then 15 minutes later when I bumped into them in the photocopy room, they would say they had emailed me, leading to a full conversation about it. Always made me laugh.
Although I tried to stop sending emails after a certain time, there were people still sending them and I would go in of a morning and end up with 50+ emails to work through before the day started – I found it easier to keep ontop of them and feel prepared the following day. That did however mean that I struggled to turn off as would be reading awful emails at 11pm…not healthy. There was then the massive rush to send emails the following day. It would get to 7am and suddenly everyone would be emailing – this was before we worked out you could put emails into your draft box to automatically send at 7am!. It did cut some emails out and make people talk to each other though.
I like the idea of none at the weekend- maybe that should be a starting point!