Outwit your inbox

Max Lucado, one of the world’s top-selling Christian authors, was celebrating. Was it the publication of another best-seller? Receipt of a literary prize? A better golf score?

None of the above: “Lift your glasses, please, and join me in a toast to my empty e-mail inbox,” Mr. Lucado announced on the afternoon of July 1 to the 20,292 people following him on Twitter, an Internet-based social network. “May you remain in your wonderful state,” he wrote.

The daily flood of e-mail messages — like the McDonald’s sign, “billions and billions served” — is unrelenting and frustrating to many.

“OMG your Twitter [message] just hit a nerve,” New York publicist Ian Twinn of Brodeur Partners e-mailed in response to a reporter’s online query about e-mail overload.

“I just came out of a three-hour meeting to 118 e-mails. Many of which deal with threads that are being replied to by multiple people and arriving out of order. I’m now having to figure out who said what when!!!”

Mr. Twinn is far from suffering alone. Bob Cusick, founder and chief executive officer of Clickware, a computer application design and development firm in Moorpark, Calif., confronts his own digital tsunami every day.

“I literally get between 850 and 1,500 e-mails per day through my six e-mail accounts,” Mr. Cusick said. “I get so much spam that I have had to develop over 475 mail rules — just to have [a] high likelihood of getting the 40 to 50 messages that ‘matter.’ Even then, I have to perform three or four ‘finds’ in my inboxes to ensure that I didn’t miss a legitimate e-mail among the morass … It’s very, very frustrating, time-consuming and just a huge pain.”

Randall Dean feels Mr. Cusick’s pain, and, he claims, has a solution: Turn off the e-mail notification sound effect, which he said sounds like “bling” in Microsoft Corp.’s Outlook e-mail client, and stop jumping every time a message comes in.

“When I work with my interns at Michigan State University in the undergrad program, they tend to respond very, very quickly to their e-mail, and [it] makes me think they’re paying too much attention,” said Mr. Dean, whose book “Taming the E-Mail Beast” (Sortis Publishing) was released in June.

“Their normal response is two to three minutes,” he added, which suggests “they don’t have enough to do or are not prioritizing the things that come in.” Workers who pounce on every new e-mail may imperil their jobs, Mr. Dean said.

“Because of the urgent nature of the e-mails they’re receiving and the sheer volume, [some people are] making poor decisions. They’re not giving enough priority to the issues on their plate.”

What may have been endearing in the 1998 romantic comedy “You’ve Got Mail” becomes less amusing in real life. Mr. Dean said today’s instant e-mail responders have “almost a Pavlovian response. They stop to jump over and see what that message is.” Mr. Dean cited a study from the University of London’s Institute of Psychology, which, he said, suggested “people who constantly check e-mails and phone calls have a 10-point hit on their IQ — as if you missed an entire night’s sleep, or more than double the loss from smoking a marijuana joint.

Men are worse since they’re not good at multitasking. In an e-mail response to a reporter’s question, Glenn Wilson, the psychologist who conducted the study, said the marijuana comparison “was made by others, not me, against separately published work.”

However, regardless of how e-mail confusion stacks up against rolling a fatty, the sense of overload still stalks users.

“My office e-mail gets spam in German, Chinese, Spanish, Portuguese (I think). French and Hebrew (once),” noted Vicki Stearn, corporate communications director at HD Radio developer iBiquity Digital Corp. in Columbia, Md. “But I’m really overwhelmed by the e-mails (and tweets and RSS feeds) that I am interested in.”

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