Technology correspondent, Andy Goldberg, discovers that many workers are feeling drained by the constant flood of communications in the digital age.

In the heart of Silicon Valley a strange movement is taking shape.

None other than Paul Otellini, the CEO of chip-manufacturer Intel, gave the battle cry last month when he complained that the scourge of email overload was having a detrimental effect on the productivity of his prized engineers.

Otellini, who as a 30 year veteran of Intel has done as much as anyone to drive digital culture into the mainstream, complained in an interview with the Financial Times about "the fact that engineers two cubicles apart send an e-mail rather than get up and talk."  

"The whole nature of sitting down and hashing out ideas and collaborating is a bit stymied by the construct of the cubicles," Otellini said.

It didn't take long for his problem-solving engineers to respond to his challenge.

They morphed the long-accepted corporate tradition of casual Fridays into No-email Fridays. With only 150 engineers taking part in the pilot project, it's still far from widespread in Intel, a company that employs 100,000 people around the world.

The rule isn't even steadfast.

In his blog post on the subject, Nathan Zeldes, an Intel engineer, explains that the idea is to encourage members of the pilot group to "focus each Friday on direct conversation - face to face or by telephone - for interpersonal communication within the group."

"Processing email from other groups is OK; sending email within the group is also OK - when it is necessary. But as much as possible, they will try to walk across the aisle or pick up the phone," Zeldes says.

Yet despite its limits the experiment certainly points to the problems that many workers are experiencing with the constant flood of communications in the digital age.

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