Flickr Photo: pireus+Personal productivity. It's a minor obsession of mine. I try really hard not to bring my work home with me. When I'm not at the office, I try to focus on my kid and, occasionally, my husband. So I try to cram as much work as possible into each work day.

I've got some good systems in place for a lot of my information management. But the Achilles Heel of my personal productivity plan is, and always has been, email. If I'm not checking my email, I'm thinking about checking my email. I had to rewrite this post because I checked my email while writing it, then accidentally closed the window I was writing in.

If you share this problem, at least know we're in good company. The very same people who unleashed the emails monsters among us are now grappling with ways to tame email. A really fun article in the New York Times points out that Intel, Google, et. al., are all trying to tackle their email overload:

A Google software engineer last week introduced E-Mail Addict, an experimental feature for the company’s e-mail service that lets people cut themselves off from their in-boxes for 15 minutes.

While I view my email addiction as a minor annoyance, it may actually be costing our sector a lot more time and money than we thought:

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 company, which draws its data from 40,000 people who have tracking software on their computers, found that on average the worker also stops at 40 Web sites over the course of the day.

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. The firm says that a big chunk of that cost comes from the time it takes people to recover from an interruption and get back to work.

So next time you hear your colleague wondering out loud, "What was I doing," you might want to suggest that she stop checking her email. While Google and others may be trying to find technical solutions to our email addiction, we all know that no technology can cure us.

But I'm definitely not ready to go cold turkey. Do they make an email patch?