The deluge of office and personal email and IM and texting, along with web surfing, putzing with iTunes and so on has workers increasingly distracted from … oh yeah … work. We simply can’t not look at it all, and so we’re distracted like never before.

These ties that bind us to our companies, families and friends — every minute, every evening, every vacation — are costing billions on the job and ruining our time off. And it’s all stressing us out, which can be deadly.

This collective technotether — not on Google yet, so I’ll define it as “the technology and 24/7 modern mindset that diffuse focus on the job, fuel stress, and thwart relaxation off the job” — even sneaks into spouses bedrooms late at night when email checking and web surfing replace, um, watching Johnny Carson.

A study earlier this year found that some people may be as addicted to personal electronic devices as junkies are to drugs. Among the signs of addiction: You can’t get through dinner without checking messages.

What companies are doing

Awareness of the problem’s psychological and economic costs is growing among employers, particularly they’re taking note of the lost productivity. And the big companies that created the technotethers (Intel, Microsoft et al.) are trying to lessen the impact with everything from new software to better manage how often things beep and flash to pilot workflow programs designed to turn down the e-chatter, according to an article in the NY Times today.

The article quantifies the problem some, suggesting there’s money to be made by figuring out how to get workers to work again:

A typical information worker who sits at a computer all day turns to his e-mail program more than 50 times and uses instant messaging 77 times, according to one measure by RescueTime, a company that analyzes computer habits. … The fractured attention comes at a cost. In the United States, more than $650 billion a year in productivity is lost because of unnecessary interruptions, predominately mundane matters, according to Basex.

Some of us check email 50 times before half the country wakes up.

One thing the article largely overlooked: Workers who can figure out ways to cut down their own distractions (set the email program to check every 15 minutes instead of every minute; keep IMs briefer; don’t forward email jokes) they become more productive and theoretically more valuable

Another factor beyond the scope of the Times article: The technotether destroys your time off, so you come back to work as exhausted as when you left. While this might be a harder problem to quantify, companies should start trying harder to ignore workers who are on vacation.

What you can do

A study released earlier this month claims that instant messaging actually decreases interruptions in the workplace.

The research found that IMs were often “used as a substitute for other, more disruptive forms of communication such as the telephone, e-mail, and face-to-face conversations.” Using instant messaging led to more conversations on the computer, but the conversations were briefer, said R. Kelly Garrett, co-author of the study and assistant professor of communication at Ohio State University.

The telephone survey involved 912 office workers in 12 metropolitan areas The results were published recently in the Journal of Computer Mediated Communication.

Instead of dropping in unexpectedly, many IM coworkers to see when they are available, the survey found. Many also use IM to get quick answers or to inquire about tasks instead of engaging in longer face-to-face conversations.

“We find that employees are quite strategic in their use of instant messaging. They are using it to check in with their colleagues to find out if they’re busy before interrupting them in a more intrusive way,” Garrett said.

Sounds good, but in reality, I think IM can be either highly valuable or horribly intrusive, depending on how it’s used. A lot of younger workers tend to be more chatty and inclined to begin and end an IM session with extra salutations or extraneous comments, while upper-management-types are more concise. Workers closer to each other in the chain of command tend, I think, to use IM to “catch up” more, lengthening the interruptions to real work, whereas others separated in the chain are more likely to hand down orders or take them and end an IM session quickly. If Bill Gates IMs to suggest you need to fix that software security loophole, you don’t reply:

hey bill.

sure. I’ll get right on it.
how’s the global philanthropy going?

Company culture (and individual managers setting some informal IM polices) play a big role in all this.

Outside the workplace, cutting the technotether (or at least loosening it a bit) might be as simple as choosing to do so, assuming you don’t fear it’ll get you fired.

I did an experiment on my last vacation, because I needed a real one: I asked my immediate colleagues (not the whole company) to exclude me from emails unless it was something I really needed to see. I made sure everyone knew who to turn to for answers on various possible problems before they turned to me. And I told them to call me anytime. On my Treo, then, I checked email 2-3 times a day in sessions lasting just a few minutes, and I was actually able to keep up with the email load and return to work a week later with an empty inbox. I got just a couple of phone calls, and in each case was glad they’d called for my input. Most important, I enjoyed my vacation.

It was a small step but it helped. Another step I need to take, and I know this will be harder, is to send fewer emails and IMs to my staff, during the day, at night and over the weekend, so they can do their jobs. And maybe I should stop blogging on Saturdays…