Eric, a client of mine, owned and ran a successful service firm with sales of $3.5 million per year and a healthy profit margin. But, he told me, “We’re bursting at the seams. I’m working six or seven days a week, putting in 70-plus hours a week, and my team are all regularly working 60-plus hours a week. Is it that I just need to hire more staff?”

He didn’t think so, but wasn’t sure what else to do. “We’ve got a solid team here, and I don’t want to make it any more complicated,” he added. After hashing things out together, it became clear that the overload Eric and his company were experiencing wasn’t just a staffing issue. It was more likely a productivity one, starting with how Eric communicated with his staff. Three of his bad email habits were trickling down to everybody else, undermining the entire team’s working methods.

The faster you reply, the more responses you’ll get.

Make no mistake: They’re widespread in other companies, too. And especially when leaders misuse email, the negative consequences for others can quickly become magnified. Here’s what to watch out for.

If you’re constantly checking your inbox–or even worse, getting push notifications that prod you to–chances are you aren’t using email very effectively. Over time, that makes email itself a source of anxiety. My client confessed to feeling uncomfortable as a result of simply not knowing what was in his inbox, and he worried that if he didn’t stay on top of it, he would drown in it.

These are fallacies that can quickly become self-fulfilling prophecies. First, it means your attention is constantly getting pulled from higher-value activities so you can handle an incoming message–often a trivial one. As UC Irvine researcher Gloria Mark discovered, it takes the average office worker 20 minutes to return from that interruption to whatever they were doing before.

Hyper-responsiveness to email doesn’t just chop your day into a series of small slivers of work punctuated by distraction, it also increases the volume of email you’re likely to get. And if you’re a leader, that can magnify your entire team’s email load proportionately. Think of it this way: The faster you reply, the more responses you’ll get in. If you write a total three notes to a team member about the same project in the space of an afternoon, that means they’ve likely written three, too–one of theirs alternating with one of yours–for a six-email thread. But if you’d just waited to check in until the end of the day or the following morning, you’re only writing one note apiece.

One of the best ways to reduce your total email load is to let it “age”–in other words, simply waiting for an hour or two before you reply, or holding your reply for the next day. This allows you to “batch” your time spent responding to email during defined periods, then ignore it the rest of the time so you can focus on other things.