When your inbox is creaking under the weight of emails that you know you just have to read and answer, don’t you sometimes wish that you could stop the clock and give yourself a breather?

That’s the idea between a new plug-in for Microsoft’s email program Outlook 2007. Called Email Prioritizer, it has two main features. The first is like an electronic Do Not Disturb sign. It lets you choose not have any email delivered to your inbox for a specified period of time or until your current meeting ends – as long as it has been scheduled in Outlook.

But it is the second part, the Prioritizer itself, that is more interesting. This rates incoming email messages with between zero and three stars based on a series of rules that you set yourself. For example, it allows you to set how many stars emails from your boss should warrant. If you jump at their every command, you should set it to three. If you think he’s a pompous twit, you can set the priority to zero. You can also set star ratings for your team members, people who you are due to meet in the next few days, people you have emailed recently and emails where you are the only recipient.

Email Prioritizer, and Google’s Email Addict service for the popular Gmail service, are just a couple of a the new technologies that help deal with information overload, an increasingly important issue in businesses.

The average email user received more than 160 emails a day in 2008, according to figures from market research firm the Radicati Group, while a study by the University of California at Irvine tracked 36 office workers and found that employees spent just 11 minutes on a project before an email notification, phone ring or knock on the door interrupted them. In the study, it took 25 minutes on average to return to the original task, with research company Basex estimating that 28 per cent of a day is lost in interruptions of this kind.

The Information Overload Research Group, a non-profit organisation made up of researchers, practitioners and technologists from academia and the business world, was set up in 2006 and has a number of tips to handle email overload:

• Set up a “Five Weeks Folder” in your email program which is automatically emptied every five weeks. You can put emails in here that you don't think you'll need but, equally, you are not entirely sure they won’t call you tomorrow.

• Turn email notifications off - save yourself from being constantly interrupted as new emails arrive.

• Limit your cc's and replies to all - only copy people on emails who really need to get the email.

But information overload is not just about email. Companies are handling more and larger documents in electronic form. Technology firm Xerox is developing a technology called Hybrid Catgorizer that automatically scans, sorts, extracts and reviews electronic documents. This means that incoming documents can be automatically forwarded to the correct recipient or, even smarter, sent off to a document management system for later retrieval and use.

The system uses automatic language analysis and machine-learning algorithms – using previously documents to guide it what to do with newly arrived ones - to achieve this filtering.

Similarly, keeping abreast of what your competitors are doing is an essential function of any business, but how do you keep track of what they are doing on the web?

One category of tool that has proven increasingly popular in recent years is website monitoring technology. Programs such as WebSite Watcher and Copernic Tracker mean that you can keep an electronic eye on your rival’s webpages. Any time they make a change, you are notified.

With WebSite Watcher, for instance, you can look at one screen that shows a list of any pages that have changed since the last check. Click on the link and it highlights what has changed. This can save you enormous amounts of time

It’s all enough to make you wonder whether all our jobs will one day be outsourced to technology.