Clare Burge thought that she had a good handle on her email, until she returned from a 10-day trip to Morocco in 2001 to find 10,000 new messages in her inbox. Stress took over her post-holiday glow and Burge wondered why she had even bothered to leave at all.

Then in a moment of madness, as Burge called it, she decided to embark on a bold one-year experiment: she’d stop using email. She put an automatic response on her personal and work email accounts that asked people to call her instead. For Burge it was a life-changing moment.

Source: BBC News

Date: March 26th, 2015

Link (to paste into browser to read article): http://www.bbc.com/capital/story/20150324-the-companies-that-banned-email

Discussion

1) The article reports that there are “estimates that it takes 64 seconds to get back to work after checking a new message.” What is going on here?

2) E-mail was (is) a transformational technology. The very first e-mail message was sent in 1971. How efficient would your work (or social life) be without e-mail, and what steps would you take if e-mail were not available?