New technology has always been promoted as a tool to make life easier, freeing us from mundane tasks and opening up time for the better things in life.

But it turns out that new technology can enslave us as well.

Take e-mail, for example. Some people spend hours a day just dealing with their electronic correspondence.

"You're going in and out of your office you've got to go to meetings you've got the phone ringing and how do you answer all these e-mails, right?" said Danielle Iversen.

She gets about 100 e-mails every day.

"To me, it's hard. You have to type out and reply back to them and make sure you have no spelling mistakes," she said. "That's a little overwhelming."

Working from home means she's plugged in day and night.

"I e-mail people until three, four in the morning. I won't go to bed until I've answered all my e-mails and that's pretty bad."

But it can get worse – and likely will.

Gisela McKay is so connected she needs luggage on wheels to carry around her laptop computer, organizer, phones – everything she needs to stay online.

"I have Internet access in my bed, OK?" McKay said. "I can sit there with my laptop in my bed and it's everywhere. There's no place where I am not connected."

University of Toronto Professor Barry Wellman, who studies the way people communicate online, knows how easily technology can turn people into workers 24 hours a day seven days a week.

"When you finish a job at the factory, you go home and you leave your work behind," he said. "When I finish a job, I put my disk in my pocket and I boot up when I get home.

"That can be really a bummer."

McKay's solution to being overconnected is to tune out when she feels overwhelmed.

"I've discovered for me it's just a matter of establishing boundaries and putting your foot down and saying, 'This is too much,'" she said.

But many people have a hard time tuning out when information has become an integral tool in the working world.