How many new gadgets must we buy and get addicted to before we start kicking some electronic habits?

One of my best friends still doesn't have an answering machine, and when I get my daily call with no one on the other end of the line, I think maybe she's not missing too much. People who really want to talk to you will keep calling until you're home.

The ubiquitous cell phone is one of the newer must-have gadgets that I've managed to avoid. In the 20 years, since the advent of cell phones, I've only really wished I had one twice — and it hardly seems worth buying a monthly service to use only once every 10 years.

But even more time-consuming than cell phones is another electronic fad — e-mail — which, despite any Miranda warnings, I'll confess that I'm guilty of using. In today's newspaper business, e-mail is as vital as yesterday's typewriters. 

If we may believe a recent piece by Bill Hendrick of Cox News Service, there are 35 billion (with a B) e-mails sent every day. A research outfit called Basex estimated that dealing with all those e-mails requires workers to spend 28 billion hours a year, costing companies $650 billion in working time.

Let's not get hung up here, wondering how many of those e-messages are really about company business and how many are merely monkey business. Either way, responding to them does take a big hunk of time.

 Thomas Boston, a professor at Georgia Tech, told Hendrick: "E-mail is the Trojan horse of office productivity. Most people I know spend more time checking e-mails than reading for knowledge or pleasure. I can easily spend three hours a day on e-mail-related tasks."

 The rationale is that e-mail makes people more productive than they were before the golden age of high-and-higher tech. But another professor, Michal Ann Strahilevitz of Golden Gate University, told Hendrick: "The time we used to find for tasks that require more than a few minutes of concentration are now being eaten up by unnecessary communications. We over-communicate now to too many people because it is so easy to do." 

So many people are now so addicted to e-mail, you wonder how they find time to satisfy their addiction to their cell phones. 

This e-addiction has become such a national epidemic that Marsha Egan, who identifies herself as a "coach" for business executives, outlined a 12-step program to kick the e-mail habit. Talking to Alex L. Goldfayn of McClatchy-Tribune News Service, she said too many people feel compelled to check their e-mail every time the computer bell announces, "You've got mail" — even in the middle of the night — and she said they really do need help.

Egan may have been hung up on having 12 steps in her self-help program, so some — like unwanted e-mails — seem superfluous. But here are some that apply to all e-mail addicts:

— Admit that your e-mail is managing you; that you are addicted.

— Adopt a two-minute rule: If it can be handled and deleted in less than two  minutes, do so.

— Set a realistic target date by which to empty your "in" box. (But it's so easy to fudge that one, by simply moving items from the "in" box to some other file — where they're still cluttering up the system.)

— Turn off automatic send/receive, thereby turning off all interruptions.

— Reduce the amount of e-mail you receive. Get a junk-mail filter and unsubscribe to commercial mailings.

(For anyone who wants Egan's full dozen self-help steps, go online to: http://www.eganemailsolutions.com.)

While some folks are finding migraines in the proliferation of e-mail, naturally, someone else found some humor. It's a report on the latest form of e-mail virus, which is especially contagious for folks who were born before 1965:

Symptoms:

— Causes you to send the same e-mail to the same person twice.

— Causes you to send a blank e-mail.

— Causes you to send e-mail to the wrong person.

— Causes you to send the same e-mail back to the person who sent it to you.

— Causes you to forget to attach the attachment.

— Causes you to hit "Send" before you've finished.

— Causes you to hit "Delete" instead of "Send."

— Causes you to hit "Send" instead of "Delete."

Of course, it's called the "C-Nile Virus" — and if I didn't check my e-mail regularly, I  would miss out on gems like this.

— Chuck Thomas is a Star columnist whose column appears on the Opinion pages each Saturday. His e-mail address is star4cthomas@earthlink.net.