Email takes up more and more of our time at work, according to Radicati Group, a Palo Alto, Calif., research and consulting firm. Emails sent by a company's workers are projected to increase 27 percent this year, to an average of 47 a day, up from 37 a day in 2006.

The question then becomes "Do we really want our company to be spending so much of its time doing something that ultimately isn't productive?" But how can we live without it?

Take, for example, my full-time job at National Public Radio. I get emails nonstop all day long: emails about stories, emails from human resources, emails about people looking for lost Blackberrys or books that they left in a recording booth, mails purportedly from high-ranking folks in Nigeria who want to give me lots of money, email about . . . you get the picture.

When Dr. Ken Siegel, (a psychologist and president of Impact Group, management consultants in Los Angeles) works with business executives, he tries to give them strategies to tame the digital beast and get more value from their work.

Thus "No email Fridays" were born. But it was not a painless birth for many who tried it. In a recent piece in The Wall Street Journal, Nancy Flynn, executive director of the ePolicy Institute, a Columbus, Ohio, training and consulting firm, supported the idea of no email one day a week. But she included a warning: "When you try to take email away from some users, they're going to panic." Panic? I would expect riots.

Ever seen people with their Blackberrys? It's like watching Pavlov's dog. The moment the stimulus is given (an email arrives), the response is provoked: "Must answer now!"

Siegel agrees that it's not easy. But the benefit, he says, is—yes-- increased productivity once you get over those initial panic attacks. Siegel says once people can't rely on email, problems are solved more quickly. An e-mail string that might bounce back and forth in six to 12 messages over a day or two sometimes can be solved with a 10-minute face-to-face meeting. And that face-to-face thing actually improves relationships.

Siegel offers other ideas. One executive he worked with started blocking all messages on which he was cc'ed. After a while, people realized that if they wanted this executive to help solve an issue, they would have to talk to him in person.

Siegel knows that email is a part of our working world now, and there's no turning back. But he also believes that it's time we grabbed the email bull by its horns and wrestle it into submission. Email should not dictate how we operate at work, or even at home, he says.

"Email is a tool with clear and viable uses and benefits," Siegel concludes. "Communication isn't one of them. Businesses and individuals need to set guidelines when it should be used and when it shouldn't be used. And we'll all be better off once we do it."