I can see the wisdom in Never Check Your Email First Or Last (originally from Daring Fireball). I don’t really receive a great deal of email that isn’t spam so it is rare that checking it distracts me. I do catch myself at various times during the day checking my Junk folder to see if there are any support messages I need to handle, but it doesn’t take more than a minute to do. My wife on the other hand would be well served by this advice. She works in an office environment at a university and email is the primary means of communication. Her work email is accessible at home and many times she does read it before bed and I know it stresses her out on occasion. Following the advice in the linked post and setting Mail to check for new email less frequently would probably be beneficial for all of us.
Email has become like the phone, we drop everything to read it. Just the other day I answered the phone when I was right in the middle of working on some complex code. 40 minutes later (and none the wiser for the interruption) I had to try to re-immerse myself in it. Handling email may not take that much time but the effect is the same. RSS feeds (particularly for blogs) are a much larger distraction for me. Like email they can arrive at any time, but unlike email are often more relevant and send me off reading potentially lengthy content and surfing the web. Even worse, sometimes they inspire me to write my own blog entry 
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