I worked last weekend, and was able to accomplish a lot, mainly because I didn’t have the influx of daily work-related email in my box. One thing I’ve noticed in the past decade is that many people expect a response within an hour. If a longer period of time elapses, I get a phone call, following up. I’ve tried to manage these expectations by only checking email on the hour, or a few times a day, but without much luck (or willpower, perhaps). In any case, I get too much email, and it often interferes with the actual business of doing work.

You’ve got too much email affirms that this is a common experience:

Even if the e-mail is friendly, there’s still risk of offense if the recipient doesn’t respond quickly. Already feeling pressured to keep up with her in-box, attorney Jamison feels added stress from this kind of friendly fire.

“Less than half a day goes by and you’ll get an e-mail saying, ‘Why haven’t you responded to my e-mail?’ ” she says. “The expectation, because you’ve sent it, is the other person is looking at his screen all the time and his job is to look at his screen waiting for e-mails.”

According to Jackson [author of the recently published book “Distracted: The Erosion of Attention and the Coming Dark Age.”], information overload is not just making life at the dinner table less pleasant as Mom checks her BlackBerry, but it’s also undermining civilization itself.

“We’re so overloaded by information bites that we’re less and less able to go deeply, to create knowledge or wisdom out of all the information,” she says. “This is one reason why I say we’re on the cusp of a dark age.”