"Getting things done" at work

Recently, at one of our YUZ meetings, someone expressed their frustration at putting "zen practice" into practice... at work. They talked about how hard it is to not respond to all their emails, to not strive to get all their work done within given deadlines, and to not feel stressed about all of this. Conceptually, zen was great, but in practice, it seemed impossible.
As I heard this, I wanted to say "Just try not answering all your emails, you'd be surprised at how okay it is to not answer them all. And those deadlines, if you miss them, it turns out that the world doesn't end. There will be some suffering, and probably some yelling, but life will continue."
But I didn't say that, because it was ridiculous. I wasn't going to ask someone to risk not returning an email just because they wanted to be zen. What if that 9th email that wasn't answered was the one email that everyone needed in order to finish the project?
And so then I thought about what had allowed me to start risking practicing zen at my work, what allowed me to leave at a reasonable hour each day, what allowed me to let those seemingly all important tasks not get completed. How did I gain the confidence to risk "letting go"?
I realized that I had only gained this confidence through practice, and that this practice had come from some very specific things I had been doing at the zen center. One of the most imporant things I had been doing was soji. I think soji translates to "temple cleaning," but it's not the cleaning that develops the skill of "letting go," it's the gong.
See, when you do soji, you do whatever task the work leader assigns you to do, and you do it completely, until you hear a gong. As soon as you hear the gong, you're supposed to just stop, whether you're finished or not. This is extremely hard to do, and on several occasions, I have secretly kept working after hearing the gong in an attempt to "finish" my job. But here's what has happened. I have worked after the gong, to completely clean a bathroom, only to find it dirtied again, within the half hour. I have also fully cleaned a bathroom before the gong, had extra time, and discovered that what I thought was fully clean, could use more cleaning. In doing this, I've come to understand that, in all honesty, jobs are never done, and they're always done. We're the only ones who are making up this concept of completion. If we want to feel done, we just need to consider what we think is done and once we've done that, we have to let it go.
So then I thought about how someone could do this at home, how they could practice "soji" if they weren't lucky enough to be able to do soji at the zen center on Saturday mornings like me. Here's my suggestion. Choose some chore at home and set a timer. Do the chore until the timer goes off and then stop, really stop, leave that hair on the sink, and walk away. Then do it again the next day, but set the timer for a different time, longer or shorter, doesn't matter, just different and do the same task and stop, no matter what. Hopefully, over time, you'll see what I saw- what feels like it has to be done, doesn't, and in the grand scheme of things, we're never done. Eventually, hopefully, you'll feel like this at work too. I'm not saying that you should abandon things that need to be done because it's five o'clock. I'm just saying that over time, with practice with not totally cleaning the bathroom, you might feel better about leaving work even if the millionth email hasn't been answered.