ATOS boss Thierry Breton's ban on internal email could save us all - by forcing us to think about whether we need email at all in our daily lives.
Anyone who has either a BlackBerry or an iPhone will know just how much time sending and receiving email takes up every day.
A few years ago, I had a major IT failure and lost over one gigabyte of data, including thousands of emails. And how many times do you think I have fretted over lost correspondence?
Yes, you've guessed - not at all.
The wonderful thing about email is that sending and receiving it feels like activity. When we're under pressure to deal with correspondence, it adds to our daily stress and creates a sense of achievement.
I know one chief executive who is proud that he deals with all his email immediately - his inbox is always empty. Every day is a big achievement day. His customers don't always agree.
But truth be told, so much email is actually irrelevant. If you answered none of it, people who needed to speak to you, would.
If they didn't, then it couldn't have mattered in the first place.
I once interviewed a senior executive for a magazine who said that she binned every third item of post - snailmail in the days before email. And only twice in three years was she forced to search the black plastic bag for old correspondence. Given that she received hundreds of items every week, she thought that a price worth paying
Distract me
Email is a distraction. We could treat it as we used to handle post - look at the morning and the lunchtime delivery and deal with it when we have time. It would be like an electronic postman -- e-Postman Pat.
I suspect most of us don't do that. Nor would we want to. We constantly browse our inbox, we can become frustrated by the lack of correspondence and worry whether its emptiness somehow reflects our dwindling importance to other people.
People who matter, we might reason, are over-whelmed by email.
That we should want more to distract us in these troubled times is a worrying thing.
It's not that email is a brilliant means of communicating. It's a hard way to carry out a conversation, it's prone to potential misinterpretation and it lacks any real warmth.
Added to that, our expectations of others quickly become unreasonable. It's not uncommon for people to send email and to follow it up with a phone call asking whether it's been received.
In the days of post, we would have waited a week to ten days for a piece of correspondence to be dealt with. Now we expect a same day service. In some cases, we crave an instantaneous response.
Nor can email be good for decision-making. We've all seen senior executives in meetings dealing with correspondence in the spaces between comments. They will have half an ear on the discussion and the remainder on scanning text on a small screen.
The best conditions for great decisions? Nope.
Research on multi-tasking suggests that people who try to do more than one thing at once, do all tasks poorly.
And if that wasn't enough, people find it easy to play office games on email. Copying others into correspondence without the knowledge of the recipient is probably the most common of all. You never know who's reading your letters. Emails can easily be forwarded without our knowledge.
It's best to assume that anything that can be read by others, will, especially if it's interesting. In truth, the more 'interesting' the exchanges are likely to be, the less you should be writing things down in the first place.
Or not.
Some people follow up every cough and spit with a confirming email. Why are they so keen to commit to print? Passing remarks are quickly turned into firm promises by virtue of a confirming email.
If you haven't done so already, you might want to look at how much time you actually spend on email. You could go further and find out where all of your time goes. Do a time audit and see whether you are getting a good return on your investment. For more on this, see Peter Drucker, The effective executive.
It may well be time to rethink email in any event - and e-communication in general. If you find yourself scanning email in the evening when you should be spending time talking to your partner, then you've already gone too far. Handling work email in the evening is just work - and you won't be getting paid for the man-hours or the stress.
If the first thing you do in the morning is to check your email, then you need to get a life.
If it's the first thing your partner does in bed, then maybe he or she finds other people more interesting than you.
It probably means that email is the least of your worries.