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It takes 25 minutes to recover from a phone call or an e-mail, researchers have found, and yet the average person receives such an interruption every 11 minutes. Which means that we're never caught up; we're always out of breath, running behind.

After only two or three weeks in office, we discovered we had a backlog of 100,000 emails sent to me. We had a backlog of a thousand invitations to speak at places all over the country - and all over the world, for that matter.

One look at an email can rob you of 15 minutes of focus. One call on your cell phone, one tweet, one instant message can destroy your schedule, forcing you to move meetings, or blow off really important things, like love, and friendship.

For days on end, I avoid the Web, never logging in until about two or three, after I've written all morning. On a good week, I don't go online till after Wednesday, so four or five days might lapse without my checking e-mail.

I literally have over a thousand emails in my inbox that need to be returned. I'm sure all of my friends and certain family members are like, 'Oh, look who got nominated for an Emmy and doesn't want to write me an email back!' I need a good few hours to just sit and get on the phone.

A lot of times, people send me emails, and then I forget about them, or I never respond to them, or I respond to them weeks later.

You're on set for 15 hours, and then you go home and make sure you're posting the right stuff on social media, and then you answer your e-mails. It never stops.

At present I answer about 100 letters a month, and read 300 emails.

I refuse to this day to do e-mail because everybody I know that does it, it takes another two or three hours a day. I don't want to give two or three more hours away.