CIO magazine interviewed Nathan Zeldes and David Sward from Intel about their work to help the company combat email overload. I found this interesting:
“Knowledge workers spend about 20 hours a week doing e-mail, and one-third of that e-mail is useless,” explains Zeldes. Worse, 70 percent of e-mail gets handled within six minutes of arrival and the average worker is interrupted every three minutes, according to research. “When you switch between tasks, you incur a cognitive reorientation cost,” says David Sward, a senior human factors engineer at Intel and one of Zeldes’s partners on the infomania project. The bottom line was that Intel’s workers were wasting about six hours a week.
The article mentions some of the “technology-assisted behavior change” they are putting in place to minimize this wasted time, including delivering email less frequently and programmatically suggesting good e-mail etiquette as messages are sent. Good stuff.
[Found via the IT@Intel blog, which has other links to interviews with these guys.]