This short article identifies how e-mail has gotten out of control and wastes productive time. Organizations need to introduce some level of control over the explosion of e-mail. The information below is excerpted from an article in the (7/31/2002) Los Angeles Times, written by Leslie Brenner.

e-mail, long hailed as a timesaving boon, has taken over the workplace like a midsummer algae bloom. Tony Wright, a software developer in Seattle who recently launched (in beta form) RescueTime, a program that tracks how users spend their time on the computer, has found that 38% of office workers' time is spent on communication applications such as e-mail.

Timothy Ferriss, author of "The 4-Hour Workweek," says that what's wrong with e-mail is that it simulates forward motion but doesn't necessarily mean action. "E-mail is used as a self-validation tool by people to procrastinate and to re-create activity versus productivity," he says. Ferriss, who says he used to receive "close to 300 e-mails per hour," is now checking his personal account only twice a day.

According to a report to be published in October by the New York-based research firm Basex, interruptions such as spam, other unnecessary e-mail and instant-messages take up 28% of the average knowledge worker's day.

On top of that is what Basex chief analyst Jonathan Spira refers to as "recovery time" -- the time to get back to where you were before you were interrupted, which Spira says is 10 to 20 times the duration of the interruption. These interruptions account for up to 2.1 hours per worker per day. Multiply that by 56 million knowledge workers in the U.S., he calculates, and the cost is $650 billion per year.

Tips for Reigning in the e-mail monster

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