The Art and Science of Everything

People who reported email has high work importance tended to use work email as clean inbox work to do list

People who checked email more often reported lesser feelings of email overload. Restricting when they checked increased overload. Using folders and filing messages associated with increased feelings of overload
Limitations of laura’s method (by her own admission):

- cross-sectional analysis gives correlations but not causal accounts

People’s coping mechanisms for life in general don’t explain all the variance Laura saw in the email overload feedback.

What would it mean to generalize this topic from email overload to communication overload?

Folders are harmful!  12% of people spend their time filing. Dan Gruen points me to this paper by Olle Balter which will have some references to how folders fail people over time.
Remail IBM system that Dan Gruen worked on looks cool.  It has thread view like gmail, but they’ve added visualizations showing relation of emails to calendar events as well as thread visualization diagram for context (Gmail shows this if you scroll down the thread, also doesn’t show thread structure). Cool mobile feature is that it shows thread structure in bottom right of email being viewed so you know whether to reply to a mail you’re looking at or if you should just reply right there.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, November 8th, 2006 at 11:34 am and is filed under notes, cscw. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.