How many times per day do you check your email?

If this information hits a little too close to home for you, stop and choose who's in charge; is it you or your technology.

The average information worker — basically anyone at a desk — loses 2.1 hours of productivity every day to interruptions and distractions, according to Basex, an IT research and consulting firm.

That time is money. Computer chip giant Intel, for one, has estimated that e-mail overload can cost large companies as much as $1 billion a year in lost employee productivity.

Excerpts taken from MSNBC's article

Blunt the e-mail interruption assault:

If you’re constantly checking messages, you’re not working

By Joe Robinson

The intrusions are constant: each day a typical office employee checks e-mail 50 times and uses instant messaging 77 times, according to RescueTime, a firm that develops time-

management software. Such interruptions don't just sidetrack workers from their jobs, they also undermine their attention spans, increase stress and annoyance and decrease job satisfaction and creativity.

If the problem of interruptions is left unchecked,

it will occupy the entirety of the workday by 2031.

The interruption epidemic is reaching a crisis point at some companies and shows no sign of slowing. E-mail volume is growing at a rate of 66 percent a year, according to the E-Policy Institute.

"Technology is an addiction," says Gayle Porter, a professor of management at Rutgers University who has studied e-compulsion. "If someone can't turn their BlackBerry off, there's a problem.

"The cult of multitasking would have us believe that compulsive message-checking is the behavior of an always-on, hyper-productive worker. But it's not. It's the sign of a distracted employee who misguidedly believes he can do multiple tasks at one time. Science disagrees. People may be able to chew gum and walk at the same time, but they can't do two or more thinking tasks simultaneously.

Here's how the brain behaves when your attention slips away from a task:

The hippocampus, which manages demanding cognitive tasks and creates long-term memories, kicks the job down to the striatum, which handles rote tasks. So the gum-chewing part of the brain is now replying to the boss's e-mail. This is why you wind up addressing e-mails to people who weren't supposed to get them. Or sending messages rife with typos.

In her 2009 book "Rapt," Winifred Gallagher argues that humans are the sum of what they pay attention to: What we focus on determines our experience, knowledge, amusement, fulfillment. Yet instead of cultivating this resource, she says, we're squandering it on "whatever captures our awareness." To truly learn something, and remember it, you have to pay full attention.

Read the entire article on MSNBC's website. © 2010 msnbc.com

Excerpts taken from:

Blunt the e-mail interruption assault: If you’re constantly checking messages, you’re not working By Joe Robinson