I recently endured another team-building, personality-rating exercise that again tagged me as an Introvert, which explains why I dislike team building exercises. This feeling was not improved when I got back to my desk to trawl through another half day of e-mails that accumulated in my absence. E-mail is, to paraphrase a quote from that great American philosopher Homer Simpson about alcohol, "the cause of, and solution to, all life's (communication) problems". E-mail is also, I have discovered, the truest indicator of personality type.

Like psychologists such as Myers, Briggs and Goldberg, my Personality Type E(mail) theory has been developed over many long hours — well, at least four, anyway.

The E-type Index, which I won't call EI due to confusion with Equine Influenza or lawsuits from the Emotional Intelligence crowd, comprises three ratings based on how individuals respond to, handle and use e-mail.

Response to E-mail

How a person responds and reacts to e-mail provides the first indicator. Its traits are Stress, Power, Attentiveness and Necessary evil — or SPAN, since it's mandatory to have a catchy acronym.

Stress is the most common trait, according to a study by Glasgow University and Paisley University in the UK that revealed one in three office workers regularly suffer from "e-mail stress" as they are swamped with messages leaving them tired, frustrated and even unproductive. Who'd have guessed that without years of research?