Email used to be a "killer app," but no more. Teenagers ... conference room -- chat room -- to discuss issues as a group. Once a ... conference call using Skype.
Email Is Evolving--Are You? By Leslie Stebbins, Reference Librarian, Library and Technology Services, Brandeis University
How big is your inbox? How many times a day do you check your email? Or should I be asking how many times an hour? Every time you hear a ping? Are you a "hoarder" or a "frequent filer" of email messages? Do you check your email before you go to bed at night and while you are on vacation? Can you skip even 1 day? Or are you an email addict? Calm down. Take a deep breath. The first step is admitting you have a problem. No one is suggesting that you turn in your "crackberry" or other personal email reading devices just yet. There is no doubt that email is one of the Seven Wonders of the World in terms of software development. But, email is growing up. It is becoming unmanageable and disruptive. People are trying to make it do things it was never meant to do and some people have become excessive and abusive email users. (You know who you are.) We all know why email is great. * Email provides a written, searchable record, while at the same time having the informality and turn-taking that occurs in face-to-face conversation. * Email can be forwarded or copied to multiple recipients with a simple keystroke. * Email is asynchronous, free from the constraints of space and time. People may expect that you will read a message and respond soon, but you do it on your clock. It is not a ringing phone or an instant message that must be answered immediately. Think of what sending snail mail involves. You need paper, writing implements or even word processing software and a printer, an envelope, a stamp, a trip to a real mailbox. Email takes seconds -- a few clicks and the message is instantly transmitted to your friend Isabel at an Internet café in Lisbon. The ability to attach files and documents has cut into Federal Express' profit line. Initially developed as a communication tool, email has followed the path of many technologies invented for one purpose but now being used for several functions. People use email as a filing cabinet and archiving tool. They use it the way they used to stack papers on their desks and to file away documents long term, "just in case." Email has also become a task manager. For many people the inbox functions as their "to do" list. Some people keep things in email folders for specific projects, but many rely on frequent scans of their inbox, sorting by sender or subject line to find what they need to work on next. Email is also used as a collaborative work tool. Projects are tracked by ever-lengthening emails sent back and forth requiring additional work and information from many participants.
The Down-Side of Email -- Electropuke? Email is great, but it is just too easy to hit "Send." As my mother always said, there is a high price to pay for being too easy. The strengths of email are also its weaknesses: the simplicity, the speed, the convenience, and most of all the ability to forward and "cc" to anyone and everyone. Many of us remember the early days of email. Email was revolutionary and cool. Suddenly people who had never been accessible to you because their secretaries screened their calls became instantly available over email. Old friends got in touch; college students and parents stayed connected. Replies to emails used to be rapid, sometimes within minutes or a few hours at most. Expectations were high and people bragged about always being on their email, how full their inboxes were, and how many people emailed them. It was that thrill of opening your email -- like Meg Ryan and Tom Hanks -- we had mail! But the honeymoon is over. Meg is emailing Tom to take out the trash now and we have inboxes flooded with equally dismal "to-do" lists. Many techniques for interacting with email have become outmoded. Hoarding was a reasonable coping strategy 5 years ago, but now some hoarders have tens of thousands of email messages in their inboxes. One study found that the average worker had a mean number of 2,483 inbox items and 858 filed items. Using filters, white lists, black lists, and folders are not solving the problem. There is just too much information coming in. Sun Microsystems workers receive about 2 million internal email messages daily, with the average worker receiving 160 emails per day. Rick Feldkamp, a reengineering specialist, has found no proof that technology improves our ability to communicate. It can extend our reach, increase the number of times and speed with which we can communicate, but only the person using the technology can make the communication better or worse, not the technology itself. Email just adds to information overload. Feldkamp calls it electropuke. Email is creating increasing numbers of workaholics who check their email late into the evening trying to catch up. A recent survey by AOL found that email addicts checked their messages while in the bathroom, at church, and while driving. Some people are developing impulse control disorders, constantly checking and rechecking their email. This has a huge impact on productivity. Researchers estimate that between 10 percent and 50 percent of work time is now spent on email. Many CEOs and politicians have figured this out. Warren Buffet and Boston Mayor Tom Menino simply do not use email. Bill Gates and other industry leaders have assistants that triage most of their external email. They also use white lists that allow certain people to get through to them directly. The days of connecting to an upper-level executive are over. An ePolicy Institute study found that 43 percent of administrative professionals ghostwrite email under an executive's name and almost one-third have the power to delete incoming emails. Spam, in all its incantations, donates the most generously to information overload. There is the obvious spam and then the more benign spam that comes from well-meaning coworkers hitting "reply all." "Thanks!" Interestingly, employees surveyed by the research firm Basex felt that traditional spam was less disruptive than email from colleagues. Spam they could quickly delete, whereas email from coworkers -- including
URL pushers, joke forwarders, and "reply all" addicts -- created a more significant interruption. Compounding the problem of the sheer increase in the number of email messages is the common expectation that an email, and the action it requests, will be done almost immediately. Unlike written memos asking for a discrete work task to be completed, emails constantly evolve as they jump back and forth, tasks morph into additional tasks, and new players come on board. For many people, work has become a war zone, with incoming email messages demanding immediate response. The workday's priorities are set by whatever is sitting in the inbox. From "Killer App" to "Old Persons Medium" Email used to be a "killer app," but no more. Teenagers consider email an "old person's medium." Using email is associated with communicating with parents, professors, or bosses, or receiving attached files. More young people use instant messaging (IM), text messaging, and social networking sites such as Facebook, MySpace, and YouTube. This shift is starting to seep into the workplace. email has become the new snail mail and instant messaging the new email. If you want someone right away, you IM them. The fundamental difference between email and instant messaging is the concept of "presence." An IM user can determine if another IM user is logged on and available; interactions take place in real time. IM has the advantages of a phone conversation without being as disruptive. People need not reply immediate-ly. In addition, you only receive messages from people who know your IM name and have added it to their contact list. Texting, also called SMS (short-messaging services), is similar and often confused with IM. Texting involves sending short messages over mobile phones or other hand-held devices. The process is not as instant and the concept of "presence" is more similar to email. Messages are stored on servers and then sent, or in some cases queued, until the recipient is available. Texting can also involve sending one message to many recipients. Dennis Yang, who works for a new virtual startup called Techdirt, rarely sees his coworkers. There is no office, but Dennis usually has six or seven IMs running with his coworkers, as if they were in the same room. When they need to, they pop into a virtual conference room -- chat room -- to discuss issues as a group. Once a week, they talk by conference call using Skype. Yang only uses email to interact formally with clients. Teenagers view email inboxes as receptacles for junk mail and school announcements. Many college students, not yet in the workforce, do not read email unless it is a personal note addressed to them. Though email is not going away, like its biggest fans, it is growing older and slowing down. It no longer has the same immediacy it once had and has become more conducive to formal communications. No Longer Mr. Right or Even Mr. Right Now We need to "date" other technologies that might be more appropriate to our needs depending on the task at hand. Email needs to settle down and deal with the secondary social effects that have influenced its evolution and now weigh it down. Unlike the phone or snail mail, the problem with email is that it has always been too easy and free. But there is a significant cost. Every time you email a co-worker or work group, you are taking up people's time, interrupting their day, and diminishing their productivity.
Instead of email, consider these alternatives: * Use the phone or IM if you want someone immediately or need to talk at length about something. Set aside time for a meeting or virtual meeting if extensive conversation needs to occur. This approach may not leave a written record, but sometimes that can be an advantage. If you do need a written record -- and don't need an answer immediately -- return to email. * For an ongoing work project, use a shared work space, company server space, a wiki, or a bulletin board system set up for that project instead of email. SharePoint from Microsoft and freeware such as Google Docs & Spreadsheets and 4shared.com are becoming popular tools. Shared workspaces avoid the hassles of sending back and forth multiple versions of documents. All participants can have one written record of a project or document rather than sorting through their inboxes for orphaned messages. * For general staff announcements that not everyone needs to read, try posting them on a blog or staff intranet. That way, interested staff can opt in with information centralized in one place, but kept out of staff inboxes. Get the Monkey off Your Back Become more conscious about how you use email. Imagine someone walking into your office every 2 minutes and dumping a handful of messages on your desk that you need to respond to right away. Talk about an interruption! Check your email two or three times a day -- and that's it! Log on during peak usage times. Many people log on when they first get into work and at the end of the day, with small flurries of activity just before and after lunch. You can be one of these people. If you must deal immediately with client emails, filter everything else into a separate folder so that you are not tempted to peek at unimportant incoming messages every 5 minutes. Or use a separate email account for clients or key people in your work life and set your "ping" on only for those messages. If you are having trouble going cold turkey, set your email application to check messages once an hour. That makes for eight interruptions during the day. Many email programs are set for 5 minutes. This can result in almost 100 interruptions every workday. Do not let technology dictate your life. The whole point of technology is to make your life easier. Those Who Can't Do, Teach Develop email guidelines and a training program for employees in your organization. The majority of email in any organization is generated internally, so this is where the problem lies. One high-technology company requires email senders to rank their email with a one, two, or three priority ranking. Employees make sure to read their "ones" every day, their "twos" every few days, and sometimes never read their "threes." At another company, email is prefixed with an "I" for Information, "A" for action, and "U" for urgency. Labeling messages "urgent" can often back-fire though, with certain employees always using the urgent label. Most people determine urgency based on sender. If it's the boss, it's urgent.
Be Brief Use meaningful subject lines that summarize the email. Cut to the chase. Use a concise summary paragraph or bullets at the beginning of any long message. Consider leaving additional information out of the message and instead posting it to a shared workspace. Make action items clear. Keep replies short or consider not replying at all. Send less email. Every time you send an email you usually get one back. Consciously decide whether to use "cc:" and "reply all." Use your delete key more often. Your Inbox Is Not Your Boss Do not simply respond to the latest messages in your inbox. Your inbox should not be setting your priorities. Priority setting is a challenging life skill that many never master, but it is a mistake to pass the buck to your inbox. Some people go through their inbox and give every message a priority number. They then sort by number and proceed through their work. Other people assign each message a due date. I adhere more to the time management ethos of trying never to touch a piece of information more than once. I also do not rule out the use of such dinosaur technologies as sticky notes (Do this today!) and a pad of lined paper listing larger ongoing work projects that need attention whether or not they appear in my inbox. The Future Is Now Email, voice mail, IM, Calendar, VoIP, and other communication technologies are starting to merge. Software companies are jumping on the bandwagon to help you unify, filter, and prioritize incoming communications. AOL just rolled out OpenRide software that brings together many different communication and multimedia tools into one place. Microsoft plans to release Office Communications Server for unifying communications. Merging voice-mail and email systems is becoming common and software engineers are working on developing better filtering software to work with these systems. Text classification systems, currently used on the Web and in digital libraries, are now being developed for personal information management. But do not get your hopes too high. Having things in one place is not going to shrink the size of your inbox. Now is the time to make a commitment to reducing your use of email. One day at a time. If you are feeling shaky, reach out and IM someone. References Ducheneaut, Nicolas and Leon A. Watts, "In Search of Coherence: A Review of Email Research," Human-Computer Interaction, vol. 20, 2006, pp. 11-48. Kirkpatrick, David, "Gates and Ozzie: How to Escape Email Hell," Fortune, vol. 151, June 27, 2005, pp. 169-172. Lenhart, Amanda, Madden, Mary, and Paul Hitlin, "Teens and Technology," Pew Internet & American Life Project, 2005 [http://www.pewinternet.org/pdfs/PIP_Teens_Tech_July2005web.pdf]. Accessed Oct. 11, 2006. Thomas, Gail Fann and Cynthia King, "Reconceptualizing Email Overload," Journal of Business and Technical Communications, vol. 20, July 2006, pp. 252-287.
Trunk, Penelope, "Virtual Offices Can be Freeing, If You Can Manage Your Time," Boston Globe, Oct. 1, 2006, Section G, p. 1. Verespej, Michael A., "Communications Technology: Slave or Master?" Industry Week, vol. 244, June 19, 1995, pp. 48+. Whittaker, Steve and Candace Sidner, "E-mail Overload: Exploring Personal Information Management of E-mail," Proceedings of CHI 1996, 276 283, New York: ACM Press, 1996. Zaslow, Jeffrey, "Moving On: Hoarders vs. Deleters, Revisited. Readers Share Competing E-mail Strategies," The Wall Street Journal, Sept. 7, 2006, Section D, p. 1. ~~~~~~~~ Leslie Stebbins is a librarian at Brandeis University and the author of several books including the recently published Student Guide to Research in the Digital Age: A Guide to Locating and Evaluating Information Sources.
The Hoarder vs. the Frequent Filer Researchers studying email usage have found that people have diverse styles when it comes to using email. We all know people with offices and desks stacked with reports, utensils, old coffee cups, and paper files. Then there are those whose desks look vacant, their office space unlived in. Most of us fall somewhere in between. The most common type of email user is a hoarder. Hoarders resemble the messy office types. They keep everything piled up in their inbox; they rarely delete anything, and many claim they can find anything when needed. Some delete spam coming in, but everything else stays, because it takes too much time to delete messages, and, anyway, they might need one of them some day. Hoarders live in fear of their IT department discovering how much space they are taking up on the company server. Most hoarders don't use folders. In fact, most email users, even IT staff, use only a small fraction of the bells and whistles that come with Microsoft Outlook. Inbox hoarders distrust filing systems, probably because they are unsure of how to categorize a message, worried that they will not be able to find it later. Creating action folders based on particular tasks won't work unless you remember to actually go to these folders. The other common type of email user is the frequent filer. Frequent filers have their own set of problems. They file things away briskly and use the delete key busily to keep things neat and tidy. But even well-intentioned filers forget to go back and deal with messages in their folders. How can you identify the frequent filers? They are the colleagues who end up emailing hoarders asking for information that they have accidentally deleted. Then there are variations. For example, the "spring cleaners" come through once or twice a year and delete much of what is in their inbox, sometime moving items to folders. The "delete kings" pretty much delete everything that comes in once they have responded to it. They never put anything in a folder. They are like the obsessive couple that invites you to dinner and minutes after you take your last bite of food they have cleared the table, loaded the dishwasher, and started wiping down the counter tops. Any of this sound familiar? Recognize yourself? This article appeared first in Searcher Magazine, published by Information Today, Inc. (www.infotoday.com). Used with permission. All rights reserved. Notice: This PDF version has been prepared for the exclusive use of witnesses and delegates attending the conference ‘Examining the issues & challenges of email & e-communications: Exploring strategies with Experts’ in Newcastle upon Tyne, UK, 24-25th October 2007 (www.northumbria.ac.uk/rmwitnesss07). The use of this PDF for any other purpose is limited to personal use and any commercial use of the PDF or the loading of this version on an intranet, extranet or on the Internet requires advance permission in writing from the publisher.
