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The report notes that a typical office worker "checks e-mail more than 50 times a day, IMs 77 times and visits more than 40 Web sites a day", which was found by a study by tracking-software maker RescueTime.

And according to Basex, a company that researches workers' efficiency, e-mail is part of "the 28 per cent, or largest segment of an employee's day that is spent dealing with interruptions that aren't urgent or important. It takes time to get back on track at an apparent cost of some $684 billion a year in lost productivity globally.

IT giants Microsoft, Intel, Google and IBM are trying to fight this, forming a nonprofit group to study the problem and devise ways to help all workers cope with the "digital gluttony." The Information Overload Research Group, which will hold its first meeting in July, hopes to come up with solutions for information workers and the companies that employ them, the report said.

It is unclear as to whether the study took into account mobile emails as well- which as an increasingly common tool for workers, would blow that figure out even more.