I am not atypical for a middle-aged so-called mobile professional in how many different forms of electronic communication I use in a typical day. Here are all the modalities of communication I use pretty much daily almost all of which require I use a separate client:

• 4 email accounts
• 2 calendars
• 4 instant messenger accounts
• 1 VoIP (Skype) account
• 2 phones for voice calls (land, mobile)
• 2 voicemail boxes
• 1 text message device (my phone)
• 3 social networking sites that have inboxes
• 2 blogs I write regularly and get comments on
• 2 blogs I read regularly and make comments on
  I also get faxes in my inbox a few times per month

That adds up to 23 different forms of communication using different clients or devices for almost every one. I know people who use more. Many Millennials use more because they are using Twitter and many more social networks than I do.

A lot of people are noticing that this is amping up the complexity and stress in our lives when electronic communication was supposed to ease the stress and improve our lives.

Dr. Thomas Jackson at Loughborough University in the UK studies this intently. He sees email becoming as addictive as slot machines with employees now spending up to half a day in their inboxes. That costs companies billions according to Jackson. Dr. Jackson has also found that its not just that email and how many messages we get that wastes a lot of our time everyday. But it is also this switching from what we were doing to one client and then to another and another just to communicate. After all, communicating is what we humans seem to live for as evidenced by the people who seem unable to drive without a phone pasted to their ears. He found that it takes on average 64 seconds for a human to stop what they were doing and set themselves on a new task using a new application (or client). It takes that same 64 seconds to switch back to what they were doing after checking email or instant messenger or a text message. That is a lot of time wasting especially if you have many clients all of which are ringing, dinging and buzzing as they have messages for you all day long. But there is more to it than that. There is also the added load on us of having to organize important messages in multiple places. Suppose you are in a good meaty email dialog with someone but it heats up more and you both switch to instant messenger to finish things off. Later, could you easily find all that communications? Maybe, but not in one place.