Two Total Workday Control related notes:
This is continuation of our analysis of the 2006 ClearContext Email Usage Survey Results.
As email continues to increase in importance and take up more of our time, it’s no surprise that many of us are looking to additional tools for help to increase our productivity. It’s clear from our 2006 Email Usage Survey that users are becoming constantly connected to email – turning to webmail and mobile access in greater numbers.
Both last year and this year, we asked how people access their business and personal email – via POP, Exchange, Webmail, etc.. The business mail numbers were virtually unchanged, with the bulk of our respondents getting their business email via Exchange (54%). Of note, however, is that personal webmail use increased more than 25% over last year:
It comes as no surprise, then, that usage of the three major webmail providers up across the board:
Both Yahoo and Google almost doubled in the number of users – though at the time of our 2005 survey, Gmail was a relatively new product.
Another sign that email is taking a more important role in our lives – the number of respondents reporting that they use a mobile device to access email increasing from under 30% to over 40%. It’s interesting to note that the types of mobile devices used to access email are fairly evenly spread out across various platforms, with Blackberry taking the lead.
Besides email access and clients, we wanted to get a better idea of what tools are being utilized alongside email to help productivity. 60% of respondents said they use an anti-spam product. Much like last year, there is no clear winner in the anti-spam wars. Though we gave 14 choices of anti-spam products in the survey, more than 50% of respondents selected “Other” and specified yet another anti-spam solution. For what it’s worth, Norton and McAfee’s products had the biggest share of users, at 19% and 12% respectively.
59% of users said they were using a search product with email. Google is the clear winner for the second time in our survey, capturing 47% of the email search market – presumably via a combination of Google Desktop Search and use of the native search function in GMail. LookOut, Yahoo!, MSN, and Copernic individually captured between 10 and 15% of the market.
Finally, almost a third of respondents said they use other tools to help manage their email. Popular Outlook add-ins include Plaxo, ClearContext, Getting Things Done, LinkedIn, Anagram, and ActiveWords.
We’ll wrap things up on Monday with a summary and a handful of other tidbits from the survey.
As mentioned in our last post, 250 people completed responses to our email survey. The bulk of these respondents were sourced through our weblog and sponsors. For the most part, respondents should be considered Windows and Outlook-centric email power users.
While we all hear a lot about things like spam, distribution lists, excessive cc:’s, and many other Inbox-clogging sources of email, our survey results point to an interesting fact. It seems that people are spending more and more time processing each individual email they receive, indicating that emails are becoming even more important and generating additional work and effort for people. Let’s take a look at some of the numbers…
It’s no surprise to see that we all still receive a lot of email:
61% of us receive over 50 emails/day (about the same as last year), with approximately 9% receiving 250 emails/day or more (down from almost 15% in 2005). So, the numbers at the higher end of the scale are actually decreasing. Surprisingly, though email volumes are not increasing from last year, the amount of time spent working in email is. Last year 14% of respondents said they spent four hours or more working in email, this year 22% of us are spending that.
What’s the explanation for this? Though email volumes are the same, the makeup of that email has changed. Respondents said that the amount of spam they receive is down from last year, largely due to the success of of anti-spam meaures. Here are 2006 estimates of email receipt by content:
Last year, 38% of respondents estimated that 50% or more of their email
was non-critical, non-spam email. This year that number dropped to
13%. Clearly the email that is getting to the Inbox is more important and
consequently people are spending more time consuming and replying to
it. Some email users are becoming more cognizant of the time demands an email makes. As one respondent said:
"I try to be mindful that when I send someone an email, i’m usually creating work or demanding their time. I try to be judicious."
However, it seems like most people are increasingly using email in ways that demands additional time from others. It’s good that technologies like anti-spam tools appear to be helping in keeping people’s email under control. However, that annoying yet easy to process (delete) email appears to be replaced by more and more messages that generate real work – causing email overload to be an even bigger problem than before for many users.
As we’ve mentioned before, email is becoming a task and workflow system for many people; more like a lightweight project management tool than a simple way to communicate. As this becomes the case for more and more people, it will be critical for users and vendors to fundamentally change the way they think about email and how to make it really work.
A final note on volume – despite the proliferation of productivity methodologies that emphasize Inbox clearing, people are leaving more email in their Inbox than before. 51% last year said they kept 50 or less messages in the Inbox. That’s down to 39% this year. Meanwhile, the number keeping 1000 – 3000 messages almost doubled: 5.7% to 10%!
This appears to be based on two factors – the previously mentioned increase in email importance and the increased use of webmail clients like Gmail with large storage capacity and an emphasis on tagging and searching email. We’ll talk more about the latter in our next post.
Next Up: Email Tools & Technology
We completed our annual email usage survey last month and
have been busy compiling the data. We received
250 responses from a variety of sources, including readers of The Office Letter, Office Evolution, The Unofficial Microsoft Weblog, Yahoo!
Tech, Down the Avenue, and Paul Hammond. We gave out ClearContext discount coupons to
all respondents who left their email addresses and a lucky 21 of those received
a free license for IMS
Pro. THANKS to all for help with the
survey.
Questions on the 2006 survey were largely the same as our
2005 survey;
focusing on email usage habits, the
tools used to access email, and the methods used to stay on top of
it. This year we also added an email overload questionnaire
developed by Microsoft research to measure user’s feelings of email overload.
I’m going to post more detail over the week, but thought you
might be interested in these facts that leapt out at me:
- Though we’re receiving the same
email volume as we did last year, email users are spending more time than ever
managing that email. 25% of our respondents say they spend 4 hours or
more per day in email, up from 14% last year.- Even though we’re spending more
time managing the same email volume, our Inboxes and mail files are
growing in size. Last year 51% said they keep 50 emails or less in the
Inbox, this year that number is 39% while the percentage of people keeping 1000
or more messages in the Inbox almost doubled to 10%.
Watch for Part II, Email Volume…
Gabor Cselle has posted an overview of several different approaches researchers have taken to re-designing email, breaking it down into three categories: task driven email, smart email organization structures, and cool features. It’s always interesting to see how other folks are trying to re-envision the way email works.
Along those lines, we have posted a whitepaper that details the design decisions behind our patent pending Outlook email prioritization engine. This was written for our v1 product,
so it doesn’t detail the thought process behind some of our newer features, but you get the idea.
[via Hawk Wings]
As I prepare to take off for the US Independence Day weekend, I thought it would be a good time to revisit our Holiday Email Avalanche post. Many of us are taking some vacation time this summer to unwind but dread the return to the Inbox after an extended absence. Here are some tips to help you cope with an avalanche of email after a vacation:
I have two more "peace of mind" tips for you. I have read several recent articles that quote people who feel the need to check email while on vacation to try and avoid the inevitable email crunch. This is a mistake and should be avoided at all costs. Email begets email – the more you send the more you get in return. If you answer the important messages while "relaxing," the result is likely to be the same amount of email when you return. My advice is twofold:
With these ideas in hand, you should be able to enjoy your time off and come back refreshed and ready to tackle your work with renewed vigor. Don’t take my word for it, listen to what Omar Shahine has to say about it:
"This was the second time this year I went 7 work days w/o checking email. You know what? It worked. I trust that when I get back to work I have a system that allows me to process all the stuff and get back in the game w/o increasing my stress level and ruining my vacation. …doing email on vacation is essentially losing out on time my mind needs to not do anything work related. I can tell you that I started Monday with a lot more energy and excitement specifically because I avoided thinking or doing work while relaxing."
Gary Price posted a detailed review of ClearContext on Total Gaming. I’m fond of this quote:
"I’ve only scratched the surface of ClearContext. There’s more features
that I’ve not yet mastered, but that’s the beauty of this software. It
can be as powerful as you want, or need, it to be, keeping you in
control at all times."
Though we haven’t mentioned it in a while, Gary’s review is eligible for our free license program. Thanks for the thorough review and enjoy the product, Gary!
We have said time and time again that a good email management strategy is the key to getting on top of your Inbox. Along those lines, we’re pleased to announce that we have partnered with Michael Linenberger, author of the best selling Outlook book Total Workday Control Using Microsoft Outlook, to create a version of ClearContext that incorporates TWC custom views into the product. For a link to the download and a list of the views provided, see the ClearContext Website.
The Total Workday Control System
The Total Workday Control (TWC) System will teach you how to change the way you work using Microsoft Outlook. This system, which has been featured in Fast Company and Investor’s Business Daily, can earn you back up to 25% of your workday and week, and help you take control of your e-mail, your job, your career. The system does this by incorporating the Michael Linenberger’s eight best practices of task and e-mail management. These are simple time-tested practices that are easily applied in Outlook, but which have far-reaching impacts on your productivity. Best practices like converting e-mails to tasks, using a long term and short term task list, and identifying must-do-today tasks. The system also teaches how to reconfigure Outlook for maximum productivity. And now, most of those custom configurations are available as new built-in views within the latest version of ClearContext. For more information on the system and for information about the best-selling book that teaches this system: Total Workday Control Using Microsoft Outlook, by Michael Linenberger, go to www.workdaycontrol.com (note: order the book from the website and a free training CD is also shipped).
We are a big fan of Michael’s system here and think you will find it a great help in managing your work day. Check out the new views and let us know what you think.
Last night NBC Nightly News ran a piece by Dawn Fratangelo on email overload in the business world (article and video posted here along with some additional email management tips here). They report that more email messages are sent in a day than standard mail is sent through the postal system in year, estimating that the average corporate e-mail customer receives 133 emails/day.
Please help us validate these numbers by taking our email usage survey here.
[Hat tip to my father, who was almost as excited as I was to see this problem get some mainstream media attention!]
We have found an issue that was causing some instability in Outlook when holding composed messages open for a long period of time. This has been fixed in version 2.0.6, available here for download. For release notes on this and previous point releases, see our update page.
