Email and information overload

Second lecture discussed information overload and ways of organizing email. For example different kinds of distribution lists, filtering, etc. has been suggested to help to cope with email overload. [1], [2].

Although it is interesting to theorize, I personally don't believe that this “information overload” especially with e-mail is a real problem. At least it is not one for me. My solution for this? 1. I have several addresses for different things. (Not least important the ones I never use after I've created an account, for example in facebook, since I don't want any emails from there...) 2. I pay attention to who and where to tell my email address.

Of course, some sorting methods are handy. With these I'm perfectly satisfied with few features gmail has. Filtering emails by conversations (conversation trees) is great. I don't have need to categorize my mails – it is easy to go through the conversation when the whole of it is visible on the tree. Also, if I need to find some older email, it's enough to search the inbox with word search text-box (by topic or the sender or both) to find an old email.

Of course it can be so, that I actually don't have a vast social circle or not so many interests that require emailing... Maybe the big difference with me and the overload is that I don't have many mailing lists. As mentioned in the study by Wendy E. Mackay et al., 51% of the Information Lens rules were used for mailing lists [3].

I've also experienced the “case email” in working environment, in a modern IT-firm. Even though I received maybe up to 100 emails in the worst days, still I never set up even one filter for the emails. It simply was enough to use, say an hour a day, to go through the mails, delete the ones which had no importance at all, and then categorize the remaining with different color markers indicating the importance and order of my reactions. – I guess that last method is something that could have been more easily done by some automatic filter, and maybe if I had even more things to say focused on I would have adopted some filtering. Anyway, I my case I had no need for one.

Of course, it can be argued at I used perhaps 2 working hours every day to deal with my e-mail, and that was away from my real tasks. Actually, I disagree with that also. As the other hour was spent on examining and answering the important messages, it was in fact doing my job: communicating about different subjects with my colleagues. As the other hour can be seen as redundant organizing of irrelevant e-mails, I might argue, that one needs to have this kind of “breaks” during a working day. For example, when writing some demanding document, at times it is needed that I go take a cup of coffee and have a little break from the document writing by sorting those emails. It's the same thing as writing this text and at some point making a little break by checking facebook (which was not preferable in the work ;)


References:

1. Malone, T.W., Grant, K. R., Turbak, F., Brobst, S., & Michael D. Cohen, Intelligent Information-Sharing Systems. Comm. ACM 30, 5 (May 1987), 390-402.

2. Steve Whittaker, Candace Sidner, Email Overload:Exploring Personal Information Management of Email.Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI'96), 276-283.

3. Wendy E. Mackay et al, How Do Experienced Information Lens Users Use Rules? Proc. SIGCHI’89, 211-216.