Email is broken and it’s time to fix it

Research and Responses to Information and Email Overload

We’ve broken email

us

The Costs of Information Overload

“In fact, research conducted…shows that the problem cost the U.S. economy around $997 billion in 2010.”

- Jonathan Spira, 2011. Information Overload: None Are Immune. Information Management, 21(5), 32.

Nearly $1 trillion

“But one calculation by Nathan Zeldes and two other researchers put Intel’s annual cost of reduced efficiency, in the form of time lost to handling unnecessary e-mail and recovering from information interruptions, at nearly $1 billion.”

- Paul Hemp. (2009). Death by information overload. Harvard Business Review, 87(9), 83–89. Harvard Business School Publication Corp.

$1 billion at Intel alone

Information Overload Spam Control $-

$100.00 $200.00 $300.00 $400.00 $500.00 $600.00 $700.00 $800.00 $900.00

$1,000.00

Comparing the Costs of Two Evils

Costs

in

Billion

s o

f $

“A study by Microsoft researchers tracking the e-mail habits of coworkers found that once their work had been interrupted by an e-mail notification, people took, on average, 24 minutes to return to the suspended task.”

- Paul Hemp. (2009). Death by information overload. Harvard Business Review, 87(9), 83–89. Harvard Business School Publication Corp.

24 minutes of focus lost for each switch

“Stressed IT professionals are linked to issues of organizational commitment, turnover intentions, and work exhaustion.”“Two recent studies have emphasized the importance of technostress by studying the impacts of technostress. These studies have found that individuals experiencing technostress have lower productivity and job satisfaction, and decreased commitment to the organization.”

- Ayyagari, R., Grover, V., & Purvis, R. (2011). Technostress: Technological Antecedents and Implications. MIS Quarterly, 35(4), 831-858.

Lower productivity, job satisfaction,

decreased commitment,

turnover

What are the causes?

1.We have discarded our

social contract.

2.Volume increasing, but

quality/complexity is the bigger problem.

3.Popular coping methods

exacerbate the problem

What do we already know?

It’s a big issue to a lot of people!

Wrote a quick post (rebuttal) and put it on Hacker News:“Email is not broken, we are.”

Got up to #3 position within an hour, generated 30 comments and 53 points (as of now) 50/50 on the positive/negative tone of the comment

Traffic bump?

It’s a big issue to a lot of people!

It’s a big issue to a lot of people!

7,415+ views on that post

80 Twitter shares

11 Google+ shares

MY SERVER SURVIVED!

Existing Research

Information overload proposed as idea in 1970’s, research began in earnest in the late 80’s, early 90’s.

Email overload research began in mid-90’s.

Split across psychological and HCI barriers, little treatment in the management sciences.

Existing Research

Influential researchers with an email overload focus: Nicolas Duchenaut (Xerox PARC) Victoria Bellotti (Xerox PARC) Steve Whittaker (University of Sheffield) Danyel Fisher (Microsoft Research) Eric Horvitz (Microsoft Research) Bernard Kerr (IBM Research)

Heavily practitioner driven

Email = Tasks ≠ Communication Email is now about tasks

Multiple researchers have found that email has morphed beyond long-form communication into a task center.

The more involved the task the higher the overload “However, neither rapid-response nor extended-

response tasks are, we believe, the source of the biggest headache in managing “e-mail overload” (as defined in Whittaker and Sidner, 1996). We believe that a significant source of overloading is an overlooked factor that we call interdependent task management” (Bellotti et al., 2005).

The Overall Cause of Email Overload

“Bellotti et al., examining email as a center for tasks, found that users’ perceptions of overload corresponds to the number of unresolved tasks in the users’ inbox (and not the volume of messages incoming).”

- Hogan and Fisher, 2006

Common Coping Techniques

Filing for organization “Action” folders for specific items Massive folder structures for recall

Attention Manipulation Marking read messages as unread Resending messages to oneself to

remember them Forwarding to others

Bad Behaviors

Not communicating interaction expectations (social contract)

Multicasting (CC spam, for every 100 people CC’ed, the org loses 8 hours of working time)

Over-delegation resulting from the “cheapness” of email

Constant email checking means you never achieve full productivity

Most of the common coping methods mentioned on the previous slide

Overload 2012 - San FranciscoInformation Overload Resource Group (IORG)

Productivity vs. Acceleration

In a nutshell, current thinking and practice has confused productivity with doing more faster, or acceleration.

“Time out is a punishment because of our focus on productivity as a society.” – David Levy

“In this post-industrialist society, we don’t have a very good definition of productivity.” – Jonathan Spira

Only 5% of a knowledge worker’s day is available for reflection and deep thinking

Technostress

A real physical problem causing increased stress, decreased health, poor productivity and job satisfaction, family life conflicts, and increased turnover likelihood.

Most likely caused by fragmentation of work

“In an information economy, attention is a scarce resource” (Ayyagari et al., 2011). Scattering attention squanders both our competitive advantage as well as our wellbeing.

Executives deal with ~300 messages a day, with 40 requiring quality, complex decisions—too many (Zeldes, 2010).

Technical Solutions

Research-Driven Solutions

Appraisers (weighted rules) – Terry, 1993

Priorities System – Horvitz et al., 1999

TaskMaster – Bellotti et al., 2003

Auto-filing using intelligent agents – Whittaker, 2005

Classifying messages by type - Coussement et al., 2008

Industry-Driven Solutions

Industry-Driven Solutions

Industry-Driven Solutions

Industry-Driven Solutions

Tech solutions have been tried, but few have stuck or been implemented.

WHY?

Incomplete implementations (ie, you can’t replace Outlook)

Lack of actionable data

SOLUTIONS

Only build small tools that can integrate with existing clients and solutions

We need an email anonymizer for research

Solutions: Technical Ideas

T-Idea: Present messages based on context (time available, place)

T-Idea: Present messages based on context (time available, place)

T-Idea: Present messages based on context (time available, place)

T-Idea: Autosuggest related resources

T-Idea: Visual indicator of availability and current overload measure

Solution: Behavioral Education

What type of email manager are you?

Re-establish the Social Contract!

Decide on your email checking and response habits, both personally and as a team.

Write down these expectations as a charter or as a contract, publish for the team.

Define what will happen when people need faster responses, be aware of the habits of others.

Tips: Do these NOW!

1.Turn off desktop alerts in your email client

2.Put your receiving on a schedule, block out email times during your day

Turn off desktop alerts

Schedule send/receive times

Schedule send/receive times

Schedule send/receive times

Future Research

We need more usable/minable data. Create an email collection system that sits at the server level and collects anonymized data to create a corpus for researchers.

Knowledge management science to replace our existing and unfitting industrialist management science

Productivity vs. Acceleration

Attention self-manipulation: what and why do people repurpose tools to deal with perceived overload? Do they realize the harmful effects?

UI’s to break the message inboxand line item metaphors.