I have three email accounts--a personal account, a work account, and a school account--and every weekend it is my goal to empty out the inboxes.  I want to achieve email Zen by responding to every query and finishing every task.

I never reach this goal. 

Dealing with email adds hours of extra work to my week. While I appreciate the convenience and practicality, the sheer volume often feels overwhelming and unmanageable. I waste a lot of time on email.

I know I'm not alone:

In a study last year, Dr Thomas Jackson of Loughborough University, England, found that it takes an average of 64 seconds to recover your train of thought after interruption by email. So people who check their email every five minutes waste 8 1/2 hours a week figuring out what they were doing moments before.

And, according to some researchers, being a woman may be making the problem worse:

Researchers found that women tend to overuse self-disclosure and “I” statements, and take time to tailor e-mails to recipients. Men often ignore the socio-emotional aspects of communication and rarely include social niceties. Their keyboard communication is quick, sharp, and can border on the aggressive. Differences were so transparent, that during a “blind” gender test of anonymous e-mails, “she-mails” and “he-mails” were identified with amazing accuracy.

E-mail is perfect for rapidly distributing nuggets of information, say researchers, and the removal of normal social cues allows for pared-down, more efficient communication, a model that accords with male tendencies. But from this perspective it is easy to see how a long, chatty e-mail from a female colleague may not always be viewed positively.

There are plenty of tips for effectively dealing with email, including five fast email productivity tips and top 10 email productivity boosters.  Easiest of all, perhaps, is a two-step solution for responding to all email messages within 24 hours. Maybe email Zen is not so far off after all.