Help is at hand, however, as according to celebrity surgeon Dr Jean Louis Sebagh, “the problem is easily rectified with a bit of light Botox.”

For my own part, I believe there are two aspects of human behaviour that mean email filtering – already available in a variety of forms – is not the solution: these are a) the compulsion to check all new messages, however trivial and b) the organisational tendency to use email for pieces of communication best suited to another medium. The first aspect of human behaviour is most apparent among users of BlackBerry and other devices – what another news item suggests to me is that the piece of innovation we really need is a better thumb. This is the first news coverage I have seen of “BlackBerry Thumb” - a US woman is recovering from surgery on her thumb after too much activity on her iPhone (I know, but “iPhone Thumb” doesn’t have the same ring, does it?). When humans first evolved reversible thumbs, it was a huge step forward when it came to handling tools, food etc. and helped set us apart from other primates. But it now looks as if the human thumb is no longer adequate for our 21st century environment. Are Google working on this also?

The FT recently asked a panel what they thought with Sir Martin Sorrell weighing in heavily in favour since clients don’t switch off so why should we? I agree that the pressure is greater in a service business but do we really serve clients better by being on top of our emails even on holiday? I don’t believe so and there was a persuasive experiment by Perlow and Porter written up in the Harvard Business Review of October 2009 titled “Making Time Off Predictable & Required.” This showed that a management consultancy was regarded by its clients as delivering a superior service when its consultants spent some quality time outside the office and not checking emails.

I think it’s a real pity if organisations are now putting pressure on staff to stay on top of their emails while on holiday. It really diminishes the benefit of getting away and for the family it should be a precious period without the intrusion of ubiquitous email devices. When I have run training sessions on managing email, people always make the point that they feel less stressed when they stay on top of emails when on holiday. They pour themselves a glass of wine, they tell me, and spend no more than an hour keeping on top of things. It strikes me that there is always a glass of wine as if to convince ourselves we aren’t working. Of course, we are and the likelihoold is that most of the messages are mundane. The fact is, the anxiety caused by our awareness of an overflowing inbox is greater than the aggravation of dealing with them while away or the disapproval of partner and kids.

We are starting to see more scientific research into the impact on our cognitive ability of constantly checking for messages – and the benefits to our deep thinking capacity of simply unplugging for a while. There was a timely item on Fox News in the US this week in which some neuroscientists went off into the outdoors without their BlackBerrys – watch it here. It’s only 3 minutes long – see if you can get through it without checking for messages….

The irony of this is that sustained email checking via BlackBerry is not great from either employee or employer perspectives: if anything, it reduces productivity, is detrimental to work-life balance and crowds out deep thinking.

I expect we will see more of this in the US with the UK following suit a couple of years from now….

The Institute of Leadership & Management’s recent press release is very revealing about the state of UK workers’ relationships with holiday and leisure. A third work in some way while on holiday while 80% frequently respond to emails. 40% feel more stressed when they get back.

A lot of this is because of the normalised behavour of keeping on top of your emails via BlackBerry even during your holiday. The reseach says that two thirds check emails at least once a day. For some, this is less stressful than facing an inbox running into four figures when you get back. For others, it will be the unbreakable habit of compulsive checking and the anxiety of not knowing what messages are careering around the company.

The end result of all this is that people are not getting the benefit of being on holiday and their families’ scarce time away is diminished by the pull of emails. In the US, they are inevitably a couple of years ahead of us and the phrase “Shrinking Vacation Syndrome” has already entered the lexicon to reflect the trend towards missing holidays altogether. This has to be a damaging trend for personal resilience, work life balance and family life.

Speaking of research, I am conducting my own study as part of my MSc into the relationship between BlackBerry use and workplace stress, something that has not been done as a quantitative academic study before. I welcome indivdual respondents to the brief online survey which can be found here. I am also keen to recruit organisations for whom I am prepared to do a complimentary bespoke version of the survey. Please get in touch separately if you’s like to pursue this

If you’re at all concerned about road safety, fear not as email messages are only displayed in full when the car is stationary. Once you are on the move, you can only see “From” and “Subject” – you then get the email read to you by a computerised voice. I for one think this is still a bit worrying from a road safety perspective – people taking their eyes off the road to look at their sat nav or radio generally do so at moments of their choosing. If you are overtaking on the fast lane of a motorway and, out of the corner of your eye, you see a new email from your boss with “URGENT!!!” as the subject, you may be fatally distracted as you reach for the “read” button.

Would you be happy about your child being given a lift in a car of which the driver was checking their email in this way?

If the President can do it, why should we not make this practice common courtesy at all meetings?

Poldrack makes the point that dopamine is widely mis-conceived as a “feel-good” neurotransmitter when it is really a “gimme more” neurotransmitter. He cites some research involving rats are turned into slackers by blocking their dopamine.

Why should getting an email activate dopamine in the brain? My take-out from Poldrack’s post is that it’s about novelty. As he says himself, “from an evolutionary standpoint, we don’t want to spend all of our time and energy noticing the many things around us that don’t change from day to day.”  There are also compelling evolutionary reasons for us being rewarded for finding new information; in the ancestral environment this might have identified a source of food or important gossip about someone in our social group.

So each time the BlackBerry flashes green or buzzes, we’re responding to the natural urge to see what’s new as it might be important. It invariably isn’t but that surge of dopamine can be very powerful…

I have long been accustomed to the phenomenon of BlackBerry use by executives in meetings either with their peers or with people that are in some way lower in status (junior managers, suppliers etc.). What makes this anecdote interesting is that it suggests that the behaviour is now so entrenched among some young business people (the sales reps are described as “twenty-something”) that they perceive no rudeness or lack of civility. Presumably, they thought it quite natural to check for messages even in front of someone they were trying to sell to.

Haney explains this as “addiction” – personally, I don’t see addiction as a helpful way of approaching this behaviour but that’s for another post…

But it is House Minority Whip Eric Cantor that Robinson singles out for using his Blackberry during the speech. This behaviour is now commonplace for attendees of meetings and presentations when they should be paying attention to what’s being said in the room. I am reminded of research conducted by Glenn Wilson of Kings College, London University, who found that while nine out of 10 of his reseach subjects agreed that answering messages during face-to-face meetings or office conferences was rude, a third nonetheless felt that this had become “acceptable and seen as a sign of diligence and efficiency”.

How can something be perceived as both rude and acceptable at the same time? It surely has something to do with the perceived importance of the individual’s own messages and emails outweighing the possibility of social censure for rudeness. The persistent use of mobiles on “quiet” carriages in trains is an example of this.

There may be a groundswell forming against behaviour such as that of Eric Cantor – Luke Johnson writing recently in the Daily Telegraph announced that he was banning the use of Blackberries in all board meetings that he chaired. Good for him.