According to the Daily Telegraph on Tuesday One in three workers suffers from ’email stress’.
Having just returned to 150 ‘proper’ emails (i.e. not spam or quickly deleted cc’d messages) after a few days out of the office I can empathise.
The researchers conclusions are backed up by my anecdotal evidence of most of my fellow commuters and numerous overheard conversations on trains and buses.
The general consensus is that this is an inevitable downside of using email to communicate at work.
However not all would agree and Timothy Ferriss, for one, outlines a revolutionary solution to this modern day curse. In typical American bravado his manifesto on the ChangeThis website is titled, The Low-Information Diet: How to Eliminate E-Mail Overload & Triple Productivity in 24 Hours.
However for anyone brave enough to follow it through (and I have to confess I am not yet) I think it could be an effective answer.
another option is sending an email to all your contacts and declaring “email bankruptcy!” – see Lessig in Wired 14.08
(http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/14.08/howtodesk.html)