Work invaders: the curse of emails, tweets and Facebook

You sit down first thing in the morning, and then eight hours slip by in a blur of emailing, Facebook-ing and looking up the lyrics to half-remembered pop songs.

And then there is the issue of information overload. Emails pile up. RSS feeds, blog alerts and tweets rain down from every corner of the web. The availability of information online becomes a curse. There is suddenly so much one is expected to know simply because it's there.

So how are you to avoid drowning in all this distraction, information and pointless communication? Psychologists, companies and technology entrepreneurs are now giving this problem serious attention after a rash of depressing stories in the press. The Wall Street Journal coined the term BlackBerry Orphans for the children of parents who spend more time with their handhelds than they do with their kids.

Many workers are said to suffer from continuous partial attention, a consequence of never having the time to focus on a single activity. These are the ones who email during meetings or surf the web while on the phone. Nothing ever gets their full attention. Another new term is email apnoea, the unconscious suspension of breathing as people deal with their emails.

Microsoft researchers who tracked the email habits of their co-workers found that if someone was interrupted by an email notification it took them on average 24 minutes to return to the work they were doing before. Only a fraction of the 24 minutes would be taken up responding to the email. The rest was consumed by checking out websites, reading other emails, getting a cup of coffee. It turns out those seemingly harmless email alerts devastate your productivity. The same can be said of the vibration of a BlackBerry or a poke on Facebook.

Anyone who has undertaken a complex or difficult task at work knows that you need to devote large chunks of concentrated attention to get the big things done. Fragments of time scattered over a working week will never get a job done well. Email is also a terrible stoker of paranoia among workers. Once you send an email out, all kinds of distracting thoughts can enter your brain. When will the other person respond? Are they ignoring me? Why are they taking so long? The ambiguity of online silence, researchers have found, can be ­crippling.

One interesting solution to the problem of information and email overload is to declare a kind of bankruptcy. You shut off your feeds. Shut down your social network accounts and delete all of your emails, whether you've answered them or not. Email bankruptcy allows you a fresh, guilt-free start.

An AOL survey taken last year found that 26 per cent of email users had either declared or were considering email bankruptcy. Companies are also searching for ways to ease the email burden on their employees. The chief information officer at Nielsen Media Research in America recently requested that the Reply All button be disabled. I people wanted to reply to a long list of people, they would have to copy in the addresses themselves. It would limit all the pointless cc-ing of messages.

A recent article in the Harvard Business Review proposed that companies introduce email-free mornings, when employees spare each other emails, so everyone can catch up with their work. Another suggestion was that firms introduce guidelines for when a telephone call should be used to cut through lengthy email exchanges.

Inbox zero is a popular mantra for those who refuse to let their emails pile up. Another tactic is the five sentences rule, whereby no email should run longer than five sentences. Technology firms are coming up with software solutions to help people manage the flood of communication and information. A program called RescueTime keeps track of everything you do on your computer, then reports it in charts and graphs. Discovering the exact percentage of your week you spend web surfing can be depressing and guilt-inducing.

For those such as writers who spend most of their time word-processing, there is Dark Room for Windows, that takes your computer back to the technological dark ages. Instead of looking at all the lures of Microsoft Word or your web browser icon, you stare at a plain screen with no taskbars or menus. It is the technological equivalent of a sheet of blank paper in a typewriter.

Leechblock is software which you program to admonish you if you go to certain websites. If you tell it you don't want to spend more than 20 minutes per day on YouTube, it will stop you after 20 minutes and tell you to go back to work. To help companies limit the use of email, a new software tool called Postware issues employees with a fixed daily allotment of virtual stamps which they can allot to their email. Once they run out of stamps, they cannot send any more email.

Other firms are working on software which controls the flow of email based on an analysis of its contents and a worker's own habits. Email might be stopped, for example, if someone is in an important meeting so that they cannot be tempted to glance under the table at their BlackBerry, though that temptation might be more easily removed by not bringing the device along in the first place.

Among the Harvard Business Review's suggestions for reducing email overload without resorting to bankruptcy are: turn off automatic notifications and set aside times in the day to deal with email; if you can't reply for a few days, tell the sender when to expect a response; fill in the subject line; paste the contents of an attachment into the body of a message; think hard before replying to all; avoid email ping pong by making firm suggestions — let's meet at 10 — and by picking up the phone sooner rather than later.

But the best advice of all may be to send fewer emails. And if you can't get any work done because of all the allures awaiting you online, for a few minutes a day just turn the computer off.