ClearContext Corporate Blog

Last week we posted our analysis of the results from the 2006 Email Usage Survey, concluding that people are spending more time than ever in email and taking advantage of alternate modes of access to get to their Inbox when they need to.  Here’s a link to the posts again for your reference:

2006 Email Usage Survey Overview
On the Bright Side, We’re Getting Less Spam
Email Everywhere

We also asked a series of questions proposed by Microsoft Research for assessing our respondent’s feelings of email overload.   Our CEO and founder, Deva Hazarika, has posted his analysis of these results on his new weblog, Email Dashboard.

We have posted the raw results of all of our questions here on our site.  The graphs contain some additional data not referenced in our  previous posts (41% of you report checking email “Constantly.”  Yikes!)  A permanent home for the 2006 survey results and analysis can be found here.

On the more personal side, I think these quotes best sum up our respondents’ relationship with email:

“[Email] causes ‘overload paralysis’, where the insanity of the task prevents me from even beginning it, and so it gets worse, day by day.”

“Email takes up a great deal of my time but it is important to my job.”

Our conclusions for coping are largely the same as last year.  As email becomes increasingly important and we begin to spend more time managing messages, you’re not being fair to you, your co-workers, or your customers if you don’t have a strategy for dealing with email.  If you are looking for a way to deal with the flood of messages, I urge you to follow some of the links below:

Don’t Become a Slave To Email
Total Workday Control Using Microsoft Outlook
Vacation Email Triage
See the bottom of last year’s post for additional information on coping with email.