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Email overload isn't caused by how often you check email
Workers suffering from 'email stress': amusing article from the UK reports that an academic study found that (surprise!) lots of e-mail can stress people out, and that the problem is caused by - ?! - people checking e-mail too often. Apparently some sickos out there even check their e-mails "up to 40 times an hour." How they can possibly survive at that rate (let alone the mind-bending, time-and-space-distorting rate of once a minute, which is what I do), the journalist doesn't hazard a guess.
If the article was from The Onion I'd leave it at that, but I think this was a straight-up article, no satire intended. So let me state the obvious: you can check your e-mail once or 40 times an hour and you'll still get the same amount of overload. Provocative, I know.
In other words, the problem is not how often you check your e-mail. Rather, the problem is what happens after the e-mail arrives in the inbox: do you let it pile up? Or do you let the bits go and get the inbox to a zero count?
All this is explained in my book Bit Literacy. I wish journalists would take a peek at it, so they could offer a better solution. Meantime, check your e-mail as often as you want.
Just got your book from Amazon, looking forward to reading it.
To your point, Mark, how often you check a given inflow of mail may not change the time to process it, but it certainly does matter to the work you try to do the rest of the time, which is the "Interruptions" aspect of info overload. No one can do any serious creative thinking with interruptions every minute - the brain needs more than that to even get back in gear (the "cognitive reorientation time"). We've just published a detailed analysis of the impact of such overload - take a look: http://www.firstmonday.org/issues/issue12_8/zeldes/index.html
Interruptions are certainly an issue, but the problems stemming from built-up messages in the inbox are much worse.
As I write in the book - if interruptions are distracting, then sure, check e-mail less frequently. But DEFINITELY learn to keep the inbox empty. That's the skill most people lack, and need to learn.