The recruitment industry – possibly more than any other service business – has been transformed by the advent of the internet and email communication. This makes it all the more challenging to get the best out of very powerful communications technology without feeling at times enslaved by it. Challenges unique to the recruitment industry include the frequent need to be in contact with candidates outside normal working hours and the constant anxiety that one missed email may lead to an assignment or a highly sought candidate going to a competitor.

In this environment, it is all too easy to succumb to the habit of 24/7 email checking in which work bleeds into every facet of life, often to the dismay of family and friends. It can make our working life less effective too as we interrupt whatever we are doing to check each message as it comes in. Research from the world of work psychology suggests that every time we are interrupted, it takes us as long as 64 seconds to return to the task in hand; on 41% of occasions, we never return to the task at all. The continual and compulsive message-checking habit can, of itself, raise our stress levels and cause us to fail to see the wood for the trees. A reduced sense of perspective can lead to poor decision making.

  A number of simple tips can make communications technology more manageable:

- Turn off indicators of new email on your desktop

- As you focus on a specific piece of output – such as writing a job ad - do not allow yourself to be distracted by each message as it arrives. You would not allow yourself to be interrupted this way while interviewing a candidate so allow yourself to concentrate effectively on a given piece of work.

- Tackle your email in focused bouts

- Rather than deal with each message as it comes in, deal with messages in batches. Even doing this on an hourly basis is a more effective use of time and energy.

- Be ruthless with deletion and filing

- Try and take a “one-touch” approach with email – deal with it once. Either act upon it, delegate it, forward it, file it or delete it. If in doubt, delete it. If you subscribe to newsletter and alerts that are not-time critical, use the rules function in Microsoft Outlook to put these straight into a folder so that they do not touch your inbox.

·     Make sure you can see the bottom of your inbox

For most people this means no more than thirty or so messages. Having a huge overflowing inbox is an unrelenting source of stress – once you have cleared it, you will feel liberated. Aim to see the bottom of the inbox at least once a day

·     Turn off your BlackBerry out of hours

If you are not going to act on emails late into the evening or at weekends, try to let go of your anxiety and relax. This will make you more refreshed and full of energy to tackle them the following day. It is human nature to want to see each message on arrival – after all, the next one might bear good news. The likelihood is, though, that it will wait until tomorrow. Try it and see.

Ian Price, managing director of Grimsdyke Consulting, an information overload consultancy