Email Overload
Email overload is the feeling of being overwhelmed by a large volume of incoming messages. Email overload makes the management of the Inbox necessary. Wouldn’t it be great if the inbox itself could filter the email by prioritization, information structuring and work-flow management?
Now the user has to assess and prioritize the message based on the immediately visible message characteristics like the sender and the subject line. This decision has to be done again when the content of the message has been read. He or she has to reevaluate the initial decision regarding the action on the email. Some email messages require multiple actions as well as input and decisions from others. All these actions together with keeping email messages in your Inbox may contribute to the feeling of email overload.
A lot of blogs and websites deal with email overload and what to do about it, like: 43Folders and Lifehacker. Some of these ways how to deal with email have also been discussed on this blog so I won’t go into all the good advice about how to deal with your email inbox
Besides the use of tags for email prioritization what else is needed as inbox mechanisms for email handling, how should your inbox look and function in the future?
Research in a group of researchers working on projects and research with collaborators from a wide range of ages (25-52 years) were interviewed about their Inbox. A snapshot was taken before the interviews of their Inbox and presented to the participants with the emails cut out. The participants were asked to illustrate an inbox structure that reflected their personal preferences to organize and retrieve emails. Then, participants were asked to illustrate another Inbox structure that reflected the importance of different emails and enabled them to easily distinguish among messages.
From these interviews and data analyses the researchers found that with regards to email organization it is crucial for email clients to support assigning priority of emails without losing the temporal overview of messages. It is also important to allow linking related emails without the need to collocate them. It supports the users in obtaining a quick overview which messages contain information relevant to an email-related task and at the same time maintaining a consistent inbox structure. So sorting to predefined criteria (group, task, people) and creating automatic links to new messages that is likely to belong to one thread. That’s all that is needed for our fight against email overload, anyone suggestions for this ideal software?
Szóstek, A. (2010). ‘Dealing with My Emails’: Latent user needs in email management. Computers in Human Behavior DOI: 10.1016/j.chb.2010.09.019
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December 22, 2010 @ 10:40 am
You’ve quickly found an appropriate reader for some input:
EmailTray, my company’s software, just got reviewed in PC World http://www.pcworld.com/article/212403/free_emailtray_helps_organize_your_inbox.html
This won’t be a full email client until mid-January, but right now it’s an excellent mail reader and quick replier.
The main feature: 4 Inboxes arranged in columns, separating email by priority according to a smart algorithm (artificial intelligence). Microsoft gave us 1 Inbox back in 1995 and we spent 15 years thinking that having 1 Inbox was logical.
Even Gmail’s Priority Inbox (a copy of EmailTray’s predecessor SenderOK) goes on the idea that you will be looking at one Inbox, which is a mistake. Artificial intelligence is advanced enough that people can trust having separate Inboxes.
Now reading emails in separate Inboxes isn’t the main battle against overload. Neither is the concept of having to have related emails tied together (a quick search will help most of us find related emails if necessary).
What’s annoying would be if you read and/or deleted emails in your client (such as Outlook), and then had to process those same emails at their source, say in AOL, Gmail, Yahoo or Hotmail.
When you process email in EmailTray, it gets so processed back at the source. Even the spam folders of AOL, Gmail, Yahoo and Hotmail get emptied into the universal spam folder of EmailTray where you can browse and then delete everything everywhere all at the same time.
That is what saves time and stress.
December 22, 2010 @ 6:07 pm
Thnx would certainly have tried but I’m an a Mac, take care
Dr Shock
December 28, 2010 @ 12:02 pm
I’m working with Kwaga (http://kwaga.com) the email semantic platform working on analyzing the content of both incoming and outgoing messages.
I find this approach not only quite innovating, but also extremely useful: it gives me the list of the emails i’ve sent, that haven’t been replied (so I know who to ping again;-)) yet AND the list of incoming emails that I should answer to, but remained pending.
that’s a great improvement in my daily inbox management.
The platform has been so far “packaged” in 2 solutions: a contextual gadget for Google Apps (Kwaga Context -http://www.google.com/enterprise/marketplace/viewListing?productListingId=3960+16233236893023340010 ) and a Chrome extension for Gmail users (http://bit.ly/kwagachrome)
Last but not least: it’s free- Let me know your thoughts about it if you have a chance to test it.
Anne
December 29, 2010 @ 12:35 pm
Good article and would be interested to see the full research findings as this is related to my own research on email overload and email addiction.
Software is only one part of the solution in the fight against email overload. I’ve done some work in the area and written a few articles see http://www.brilliant-email.com/news.aspx.
What one also needs is first a process to reduce the volume of incoming email and second a way to create a pull rather than push information culture. The former means stringent personal prioritisation which many find hard.
Meanwhile, on the software side, the use of categories is very useful to help one spot and link key emails. Rules too to move second order priority emails automatically to folders also helps. (Both functions are available in Microsoft Outlook 2007 and upwards and Entourage for Mac.)
Regards, Monica