Two years ago, Jay Ellison, executive vice president at Chicago-based U.S. Cellular, got so tired of his e-mail building up to the amount of 200 a day that he finally sent out a memo to his 5,500 employees. “I’m announcing a ban on e-mail every Friday,” it read. “Get out to meet your teams face-to-face. Pick up the phone and give someone a call. … I look forward to not hearing from any of you, but stop by as often as you like.”

Needless to say, his co-workers were not thrilled with the idea, since most of them were e-mail addicts and began to queue them up and send them out Saturday 12:01 a.m. Finally complying with the memo, the staffers realized that some of them actually occupied the same floor, rather than being across the country. While we notice that many of our e-mail recipients have a tendency to go without the Internet on weekends, we still can’t completely fall into the same routine. The thing is that we’re e-mail addicts, too.