ClearContext Corporate Blog

Now the Wall Street Journal has got an article running on email overload.  This one’s a hodgepodge of suggestions from the likes of David Allen, Merlin Mann and Mike Song (among others).  I like this tip from Julie Morgenstern:

Another idea, if your job allows it: Ignore your in-box for the first
hour every morning, instead focusing on an important project. "Once you
open the email there are a million and one interruptions," Ms.
Morgenstern adds. "It’s very hard to settle your mind down and
concentrate."

Read more for the usual tips on email effectiveness,

Intel recently had their analysis of Infomania (“the mental state of continuous stress and distraction caused by the combination of queued messaging overload and incessant interruptions”) published at firstmonday.org. The paper, Infomania: Why we can’t afford to ignore it any longer, is aptly titled; it shows that Intel stands to save almost a billion dollars annually by overcoming the inefficiencies due to information overload: 

“The bottom line: Infomania causes a damage of about US$1 billion per annum for a knowledge–intensive company of 50,000 employees. As usual with such calculations, this value is conservative, representing only more direct aspects of the problem. Additional, harder to measure damages exist but are not included.”

The paper hints that the calculation above, based almost solely on measurable employee efficiency losses, may only be the tip of the iceberg. The group also found that information overload had a very tangible, negative impact on intellectual property generation, work quality and employee satisfaction. For example: 

“It is critical to understand this huge impact: because of Infomania, employees are not creating new ideas to the extent they could. New, significant inventions remain un–invented. Better solutions to major problems that may be hobbling an organization’s performance toward its goals are left undiscovered. The engineer who could have the “Aha!” insight leading to the next major product innovation is trying to find 30 minutes to think about it, and failing. The supervisor who could double a fabrication line’s efficiency can’t because they are nearly brain dead from staying up until one AM working on e–mail. Across the industry, knowledge workers and managers are thinking less, inventing less, producing less, succeeding less.”

If you think that your organization suffers from these same issues, please forward this paper to a technology buyer at your company and let them know how IMS Pro has helped you get on top of email and become more efficient. Send them my email address (brad at clearcontext dot com) and let them know that we would be happy to help them understand the scope of this issue and the solutions out there to help combat it. Thanks! 

A final note – I found this via the IT@Intel blog. If you’re interested in the solutions they are implementing to solve the problem outlined in this paper, see http://blogs.intel.com/it/tags/infomania.

The Times reports on research that found that 61% of workers felt “stressed” or “driven” by email.  The money quote from this article:

“E-mail is the thing that now causes us the most problems in our working lives.  It’s an amazing tool but it’s got out of hand.”

Somebody please tell these guys how IMS Pro can help!  Thanks to Mike Koehler for the pointer.

NBC Nightly news ran a piece last night on email overload.  From their website:

“As our society becomes more and more dependent on e-mail and text messaging, it’s easy for all that communication to get out of control.  NBC’s John Yang reports on how some people are coping.”

Andrew Baron is featured in in the interview and is in the process of declaring email bankruptcy, but says he hasn’t figured out what he’s going to do to manage email more efficiently going forward.  Sorry we can’t help you out, Andrew, but IMS Pro isn’t available for OS X yet.  In the meantime, check out our tips for handling Email Overload.

If you haven’t seen it yet, the results of the annual AOL email usage survey are all over the blogs today.  AOL found that 15% of surveyed Americans assert that they are “addicted to email” and 83% check email while on vacation.  It sounds like a widening gyre to me.  Folks are constantly in email to try and stem the flood, yet outgoing email begets new incoming email and the problem deepens.

Merlin Mann from 43 Folders gave an excellent talk at Google last week on effective email management.  If you’re looking for a nice, concise explanation of how to handle your email and why it’s important, I highly suggest you check it out.  The scripted part of the talk lasts 35 minutes or so, followed by some Q&A.

Lifehacker has some fairly spirited discussion surrounding a post suggesting that the best way to deal with email over vacation is to send an auto-response to the sender and automatically delete the original message.  From one of their readers:

“I’m going on email-less vacation for a week and already I’m dreading the mountain of messages I’ll face when I return. I’m toying with the idea of setting up a filter that auto-responds to messages while I’m on vacation saying that the sender should email me again, after I get back, if they need a response. Then delete the message automatically.”

As several commenters on the post noted, this is highly irresponsible and probably not the best move professionally.  I’ve said it before, if you aren’t managing your email effectively you’re not being fair to your customers, your co-workers or yourself.

For those of you returning from summer breaks, try using ClearContext IMS for some vacation email triage instead.

This morning the San Francisco Chronicle published an article by Chris Colin on the emotional impact email overload has on the user.  Ironically, he gathered data for the piece by spamming his contacts with questions about their relationship with email.  The result is some interesting stuff that focuses less on technology and more on negative feelings that arise from trying to manage too much email:

“Complaining about e-mail is like complaining about traffic or tourists: a facile old whine. But whines have good and bad years, and 2007 has been a doozy.”

Check it out.

In this Salon article Scott Rosenberg refutes the idea that a crowded Inbox means you don’t have your life in order.  Lifehacker is running a poll to see if their readers agree.

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.]