If you’ve ever felt overwhelmed by too many emails, you should meet Jeff Mills. He gets 300-400 every day.

“If I spent all my time reading every single email, I couldn’t do my job,” said Mills, the sales director for eROI, an internet marketing and web publishing firm in Portland’s Pearl District.

Mills is a prime example of someone who suffers from information overload. In addition to the emails, Mills subscribes to dozens of industry news letters online. He also reads articles about the latest trends.

“It’s the addiction of information, always wanting to see it,” said Mills. He copes by using online tools that help him sort through all the messages, save the ones he wants, and sort them into batches that he can quickly scroll through. “This is hugely helpful,” he said.

Other employees have a more basic problem: managing the lure of instant communication and information at work. “It has the addictive capacity not to do anything else but check to see if there’s a new email,” said Judy Clark, whose company HR Answers works with companies on how to make workers more productive. She said basic online research and preparation on the job can divert employees from their real work.

“There’s something very powerful and magnetic about all of the information, the resources, the learning that’s available to us,” Clark said. “We have trouble prioritizing that to our tasks.”

Clark said workers can get caught up reading some of the relevant material, learning new things. “It’s really fun. All of a sudden, an hour’s gone by,” said Clark.

Her advice? Train yourself to check email only a couple of times a day, and don’t feel compelled to respond to everything immediately.

Jeff Mills said he and the employees at eROI have figured out how to manage the massive amounts of information coming in without drowning in it. What’s more difficult, he said, is learning when to ignore his Blackberry, the hand held phone/email device that keeps him connected everywhere he goes. He described the lure and compulsion that comes from staying on top of the global, wired economy.

“I’ll go on vacation and say to myself ‘oh, it’s nice to get away from it all,’” said Mills. “And the first thing you do you, you check when you’re driving over the pass to Bend, you say ‘I’m in cell range I better pull that thing out and see what I got coming in.’”