There's nothing more defeating, than returning to your desk after lunch to find a hundred new emails.

So in a bid to lower stress levels of employees, an Italian company is asking its staff not to send any internal emails for a week.

The company, Gabel, based in the Como region of northern Italy is a home textiles firm. They commissioned an expert to conduct interviews of all its employees to pinpoint exactly what their main stresses and concerns were.

Published in the local paper, the results revealed that most staff members felt that tackling the barrage of internal emails was their primary bugbear.

Gabel’s response was to implement a week-long ban on internal emails.

“Together we will begin the following experiment,” writes managing director Emilio Colombo, in an email (the final one, we imagine), “which will take us back in time to when people talked more”. (Remember those days? No, us neither.)

Company goes email-free in bid to de-stress employees. Sounds like heaven...