Email addicts get help in 12 steps

Alcoholics have one, and so do drug abusers. Now people addicted to email also have a 12-step program designed to tackle their obsession.

An executive coach in Pennsylvania has devised a plan to teach people how to manage the electronic tool, which some users say can be as much an intrusive waste of time as it is fast-paced and efficient.

Developed for cases such as a golfer who checked his BlackBerry after every shot, and lost a potential client who wanted nothing to do with his obsession, Marsha Egan's plan taps into deepening concern that email misuse can cost businesses millions in lost productivity.

"There is a crisis in Corporate America, but a lot of CEOs don't know it," Egan said. "They haven't figured out how expensive it is."

One of Egan's clients cannot walk by a computer -- her own or anyone else's -- without checking for messages. Other people will not take holidays anywhere they cannot connect to their email systems. Some wait for emails and send themselves a message if one hasn't shown up in several minutes, Egan said.

The first of Egan's 12 steps is "admit that email is managing you. Let go of your need to check email every 10 minutes."

Other steps include "commit to keeping your inbox empty", "establish regular times to review your email" and "deal immediately with any email that can be handled in 2 minutes or less, but create a file for mails that will take longer."

Egan says she hosts no 12-step meetings but is planning a monthly teleconference for "emailers anonymous".

Michelle Grace, an insurance agent, said she receives up to 60 emails a day and uses Egan's program to make it less time-consuming and less stressful.

"Email had me by the throat," she said. "When you can't find what you need, then it becomes a problem."

Now that her emails are transferred -- some manually and some automatically -- into files, Grace said she spends less time hunting for them.

On average, workers who receive an email take 4 minutes to read it and recover from the interruption before they can resume working productively, Egan said.

She also recommends checking emails not more than three or four times a day.

Some employees resist the lure of email during the regular workday, only to find themselves putting in extra hours at home to clear the backlog, she said. One of Egan's clients said he had 3,600 emails in his inbox.

Part of the problem is senders who copy messages too widely and are too vague in their subject lines, so recipients don't know what they need to open right away, Egan said.

For Grace, relief from her email addiction means she is not checking her computer every five minutes.

She said she has let her colleagues know that if they need to reach her immediately, email is not the way to do it.

"I told them, 'If you need me urgently, pick up the phone,'" she said.

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