Email Dashboard

Danyel asked me for some clarification on one of the points I made in my Email Overload Scale blog entry.  I wrote "But, more importantly, businesses need to understand the impact that
excessive use of email can have on overall productivity and create an
overall corporate email usage strategy that takes that into account. "

His question was what it was I thought they should actually do then to communicate tasks – send less email?  Have less tasks (YESYESYES!!!)? What?

Here’s what I replied:

What I was referring to here was that companies often do not seem to recognize somewhat ad-hoc work generated within email as “real work.”  I see this in many situations where a company will be working on a project off a project plan (in my case, this is generally in the context of software development companies or consulting firms) and schedule the activities of a team based on the “assigned” tasks they have from that plan.  The reality, however, is that most people have two sets of things eating up their time – a set of “real” project tasks (customer work, development work, sales leads, marketing collateral, etc) that is the core, and a parallel set of tasks that are generated in a more ad-hoc fashion via email.  Not recognizing that second set of tasks when running a business is imo a large reason for projects running behind schedule and people feeling overwhelmed and overworked.

To do this means incorporating a level of metrics and measurement into email and integrating this into broader business planning, definitely incorporating some concept of scoping as you allude to regarding sizes of tasks.

Which brings up the interesting topic of metrics and measurement and how much awareness we really have about where our time is spent (besides the fact that we know it just disappears).  I’ll give some initial thoughts on this in my next post. 

BTW, since we’re in alpha mode and I’m supposed to be helping out with a lot of testing (which I love SO MUCH), I suspect my blogging frequency will increase dramatically over the next few weeks.

In a previous blog entry I discussed the Email Overload Scale paper from Microsoft Research.  One of the things they did in that paper was ask a number of subjective questions about how people felt about their email load and then correlated some of those questions with actual email usage stats collected from those people.

They suggested that other researchers incorporate those questions into their studies on email overload to provide a broader perspective on the varying factors contributing to the problem, so we did exactly that in the ClearContext Email Usage Survey.  Over on the company blog, Brad has done a lot of great analysis on the overall survey results, but I wanted to spend some time focusing on how some of our results related to what the MS Research guys saw in their project.

The questions that Microsoft Research suggested asking were the following:

I feel I spend too much time keeping up with my email
Email cuts into time I wanted to spend on other tasks
I have trouble keeping up with email on days I am away from my desk
I get too much email
I spend too much time getting rid of unimportant messages
I am satisfied with the strategy I use to keep up with my mail
When I return from vacation/time off, I feel overwhelmed when triaging my mail
Sometimes my emails may get lost or missed

I cross-tabulated the answers to those questions with a variety of the email usage questions we asked.  Here are a few interesting things  I found.

Dealing with email after being away from their desk or on vacation is a problem of comparable magnitude for everyone, regardless of the types and volumes of email they receive.  Clearly, tools and strategies to deal with quickly processing large volumes of email are very important for businesses and vendors to put in place.  Something that sounds right up my alley…

Some types of email volume had no real impact on users.  Just as the MS Research study saw, we observed no relationship between the amount of newsletter/distribution list type email users received and their feelings of email overload.  Anecdotal remarks show that users feel comfortable using rules and other techniques to quickly move through that type of email content.

A more surprising, and perhaps troubling, fact was that there was very little correlation between users who use productivity methodologies and how overloaded they feel by email. This is quite likely a function of how well users are at actually sticking to these methododologies.  It appears that many users adopt methodologies, but these methodologies are prone to falling apart as they receive higher volumes of email and emails that take more time each to process. 

There were two points where we saw a correlation (albeit not an especially strong one, but still a relatively direct one) where the MS Research study did not mention finding any correlation.  We found that people definitely felt more overloaded based on both the total number of emails they received on a daily basis as well as how often they check their email.  Many email productivity techniques advise users to only check email at specific times, and this data seems to agree that that’s likely a good idea for most users.

Two things clearly stood out by a wide margin as the strongest factors influencing feelings of email overload. 

The first was how many emails people keep in their inbox.  The degree of email overload felt by users increases drastically as they keep more and more emails in their inbox. Most of the email productivity methodologies out there recommend keeping the number of emails in your inbox low, but even among those using methodologies, many users are not able to adhere to this goal.  However, it is clearly a very important factor in keeping on top of email.  Things like having to make multiple passes of email to process messages, searching through a long list of emails to find info, and the general pressure of an unorganized and huge ‘Inbox-as-pseudo-task-list’ lead to an overwhelming feeling of email overload.  This is perhaps the single most important factor that users have direct control over that can help them feel in control of their email.  Try out some productivity methodologies and email tools.  Find a combination of tools and techniques that let you keep the number of messages in your inbox low.  You’ll feel way more in control and on top of your email.

The second huge correlation is unfortunately one that most people don’t have much control over.  While there was a slight correlation between how many emails people received and how overloaded they feel, there was a very strong correlation between how many work related emails people receive and how overloaded they feel.  From remarks in the survey, it is very clear that many of these emails are much more than informational in nature.  Many of these individual emails generate large amounts of work and discussion and have the potential to really derail people from what they are trying to focus on.  Users can do their part to manage this problem by only checking email and dealing with it at specific times as opposed to letting email make their workday completely interrupt-driven.  But, more importantly, businesses need to understand the impact that excessive use of email can have on overall productivity and create an overall corporate email usage strategy that takes that into account.

I hope you found these insights useful.  For any of you who are interested in a more scientific look at some of this data, please let me know and I can share some of the raw data with you.

Alright, some business travel and an office move got me off track on my blogging efforts, but I’m back now and committed to getting posts done on a much more frequent and regular basis.

It took the government to inspire me to get back to writing.

Going through a bunch of old articles and blog posts I had saved for review, I noticed this article that did not appear to get much coverage at all, but I really think it deserves more attention: Finding Fault With Logic of Congress’s E-Mail Plan.

In a nutshell, some representatives are now adding a challenge-response question as a required step before you can send an email to them. 

"Lawmakers still bellyache that the torrent of e-mails they get every day is more than their staffs can handle" and "the new barrier is a good way to block millions of cookie-cutter lobby letters " are the types of justifications being made for this step.  However, if I sign my name to an email that expresses my feelings on an issue, I do not want my elected government representative to ignore my voice just because I decided to send it via an organization I support or because they feel like they are overloaded with email – join the rest of us, most of whom don’t have staffs to go through the emails first!

Perhaps I’m being overly idealistic here, but I sure would like to see government officials invest in ways to actually intelligently deal with incoming communications from their constituencies as opposed to just trying to turn off the switch.

Earlier this year I visited Microsoft Research and met with Marc Smith and a couple of his Community Technologies Group team members, Andy Jacobs and Danyel Fisher.  These guys are working on a lot of fun stuff having to do with new visualization techniques for email and incorporating social network information into these views.  They released an interesting product called SNARF that uses information about correspondents to help prioritize email.  We combine our own set of correspondent metrics along with a number of message and thread characteristic metrics in our ClearContext products for a somewhat different take on email prioritization.  Anyhow, that’s a discussion for another day…

Back to the main topic… Danyel just co-wrote a paper called A Scale for Measuring Email Overload.  This is, of course, very interesting to me because I’ve spent the last three years working primarily on this problem.  They came up with 8 questions and surveyed a number of users about how overloaded with email they felt.  Then they measured the email activity of those users and tried to link various user behaviors and email activity with levels of overload.  Not unexpectedly, they found that those users distracted by frequent email notifications and those who kept trying to review and pick out emails to deal with were more likely to feel overwhelmed by email. Interestingly, they found high volumes of directly addressed email did not necessarily lead to greater feelings of overload.  A number of other factors also did not seem to affect email overload.

We have added the email overload scale questions to the 2006 Email Usage Survey we’re running at ClearContext.  That blog entry contains a link to the current survey and a link to analysis of last year’s survey (Please respond and link to the survey – the more data we can get, the more interesting the analysis will be). We ask a number of questions about the type and volume of email people receive as well as the types of techniques they use to deal with email.  By adding the 8 questions to the survey, we’ll be able to see if our respondents show the same correlations between email behaviors and feelings of email overload.  I’m especially interested in the level of correlation between people using methodologies like Getting Things Done and Total Workday Control and their feelings of email overload.  Were the correlations in Danyel’s paper applicable to a broader cross-segment of users?  Stay tuned and find out!

One of the biggest problems with email overload involves not only email, but communication in general.  Between email, instant messaging, text messaging, and phone calls (to mention some of the more common ones), there are so many ways to communicate w/ people these days.  However, using the wrong medium for the wrong type of information and responsiveness expectation can be a big waste of everyone’s time.

I’m going to write some followups to this post that go into greater depth, but at a high level I think it’s important to consider the following types of things when deciding which communication medium to use:

Is time critical responsiveness involved?  Do you need an answer right now?  If so, call or use IM if the person is online.  Expecting people to be constantly checking email sets up an ineffective email processing habit.

Is there a lot of information that needs to be documented (ie: notes, specific steps/procedures/etc.)?  If so, use email so the person has all that information and does not need to write it down and verify it all.

Will this involve some synchronous back and forth?  A lot of times there’s a flowchart-like process in making a simple decision that involves a number of back-and-forth queries.  Again, use a phone call or IM for this so two people aren’t sitting there refreshing their inbox waiting for a response.

These things (and many more) sound so simple, but I find many of us engaging in 15 minute phone calls that could be a 5 minute email or sending five rounds of emails back and forth that could have been a two minute phone call or IM convo.

There’s a lot written about how to process email and stay on top of your communications, but I believe the first step to getting information under control is using the right medium for each situation – something that a lot of very tech-savvy people still don’t do right.