This document discusses email overload and its costs. It summarizes existing research which shows that information overload costs the US economy $997 billion annually, and costs Intel nearly $1 billion per year in lost productivity. The main cause of email overload is identified as the number of unresolved tasks in a user's inbox, rather than message volume. Common coping techniques are discussed along with their drawbacks. The document also outlines some technical and behavioral solutions that have been proposed by researchers to address email overload.

1. Email is broken and
it’s time to fix it
Research and Responses to Information and Email Overload

2. The Costs of
Information Overload

3. “In fact, research conducted…shows that the
problem cost the U.S. economy around $997
billion in 2010.”
- Jonathan Spira, 2011. Information Overload: None Are Immune. Information
Management, 21(5), 32.

4. “But one calculation by Nathan Zeldes and two other
researchers put Intel’s annual cost of reduced efficiency, in the
form of time lost to handling unnecessary e-mail and
recovering from information interruptions, at nearly $1 billion.”
- Paul Hemp. (2009). Death by information overload. Harvard Business
Review, 87(9), 83–89. Harvard Business School Publication Corp.

5. Comparing the Costs of Two Evils
$1,000.00
$900.00
$800.00
Costs in Billions of $
$700.00
$600.00
$500.00
$400.00
$300.00
$200.00
$100.00
$-
Information Overload Spam Control

6. “A study by Microsoft researchers tracking the e-mail habits of
coworkers found that once their work had been interrupted by
an e-mail notification, people took, on average, 24 minutes to
return to the suspended task.”
- Paul Hemp. (2009). Death by information overload. Harvard Business
Review, 87(9), 83–89. Harvard Business School Publication Corp.

7. “Stressed IT professionals are linked to issues of organizational
commitment, turnover intentions, and work exhaustion.”
“Two recent studies have emphasized the importance of technostress by studying
the impacts of technostress. These studies have found that individuals experiencing
technostress have lower productivity and job satisfaction, and decreased
commitment to the organization.”
- Ayyagari, R., Grover, V., & Purvis, R. (2011). Technostress: Technological
Antecedents and Implications. MIS Quarterly, 35(4), 831-858.

8. What are the causes?

12. What do we
already know?

13. It’s a big issue to a lot of people!
 Wrote a quick post (rebuttal) and put it on Hacker News:
―Email is not broken, we are.‖
 Got up to #3 position within an hour, generated 30
comments and 53 points (as of now)
 50/50 on the positive/negative tone of the comment
 Traffic bump?

14. It’s a big issue to a lot of people!

15. It’s a big issue to a lot of people!
 7,415+ views on that post
 80 Twitter shares
 11 Google+ shares
 MY SERVER SURVIVED! 

16. Existing Research
 Information overload proposed as idea in
1970’s, research began in earnest in the late 80’s, early
90’s.
 Email overload research began in mid-90’s.
 Split across psychological and HCI barriers, little
treatment in the management sciences.

17. Existing Research
 Influential researchers with an email overload focus:
 Nicolas Duchenaut (Xerox PARC)
 Victoria Bellotti (Xerox PARC)
Heavily
 Steve Whittaker (University of Sheffield)
 Danyel Fisher (Microsoft Research) practitioner
 Eric Horvitz (Microsoft Research) driven
 Bernard Kerr (IBM Research)

18. Email = Tasks ≠ Communication
 Email is now about tasks
 Multiple researchers have found that email has morphed
beyond long-form communication into a task center.
 The more involved the task the higher the overload
 “However, neither rapid-response nor extended-response tasks
are, we believe, the source of the biggest headache in
managing “e-mail overload” (as defined in Whittaker and
Sidner, 1996). We believe that a significant source of
overloading is an overlooked factor that we call
interdependent task management”
(Bellotti et al., 2005).

19. The Overall Cause of Email Overload
“Bellotti et al., examining email as a center for
tasks, found that users’ perceptions of
overload corresponds to the number of
unresolved tasks in the users’ inbox (and not
the volume of messages incoming).”
- Hogan and Fisher, 2006

20. Common Coping Techniques
 Filing for organization
 “Action” folders for specific items
 Massive folder structures for recall
 Attention Manipulation
 Marking read messages as unread
 Resending messages to oneself to remember them
 Forwarding to others

21. Bad Behaviors
 Not communicating interaction expectations (social
contract)
 Multicasting (CC spam, for every 100 people CC’ed, the
org loses 8 hours of working time)
 Over-delegation resulting from the ―cheapness‖ of email
 Constant email checking means you never achieve full
productivity
 Most of the common coping methods mentioned on the
previous slide

22. Overload 2012 - San Francisco
Information Overload
Resource Group (IORG)

23. Productivity vs. Acceleration
 In a nutshell, current thinking and practice has confused
productivity with doing more faster, or acceleration.
 ―Time out is a punishment because of our focus on
productivity as a society.‖ – David Levy
 ―In this post-industrialist society, we don’t have a very
good definition of productivity.‖ – Jonathan Spira
 Only 5% of a knowledge worker’s day is available for
reflection and deep thinking

24. Technostress
 A real physical problem causing increased stress, decreased
health, poor productivity and job satisfaction, family life
conflicts, and increased turnover likelihood.
 Most likely caused by fragmentation of work
 ―In an information economy, attention is a scarce resource‖
(Ayyagari et al., 2011). Scattering attention squanders both our
competitive advantage as well as our wellbeing.
 Executives deal with ~300 messages a day, with 40 requiring
quality, complex decisions—
too many (Zeldes, 2010).

25. Technical Solutions

26. Research-Driven Solutions
 Appraisers (weighted rules) – Terry, 1993
 Priorities System – Horvitz et al., 1999
 TaskMaster – Bellotti et al., 2003
 Auto-filing using intelligent agents – Whittaker, 2005
 Classifying messages by type - Coussement et al., 2008

27. Industry-Driven Solutions

28. Industry-Driven Solutions

29. Industry-Driven Solutions

30. Industry-Driven Solutions

31. Tech solutions have been tried, but few
have stuck or been implemented.
WHY? SOLUTIONS
 Incomplete  Only build small tools that
implementations (ie, you can integrate with existing
can’t replace Outlook) clients and solutions
 Lack of actionable data  We need an email
anonymizer for research

32. Solutions:
Technical Ideas

33. T-Idea: Present messages based on
context (time available, place)

34. T-Idea: Present messages based on
context (time available, place)

35. T-Idea: Present messages based on
context (time available, place)

36. T-Idea: Autosuggest related
resources

37. T-Idea: Visual indicator of availability
and current overload measure

38. Solution:
Behavioral Education

39. What type of email manager are
you?

40. Re-establish the Social Contract!
 Decide on your email checking and response
habits, both personally and as a team.
 Write down these expectations as a charter
or as a contract, publish for the team.
 Define what will happen when people need
faster responses, be aware of the habits of
others.

41. Tips: Do these NOW!
1. Turn off desktop alerts in your
email client
2. Put your receiving on a
schedule, block out email
times during your day

42. Turn off desktop alerts

43. Schedule send/receive times

44. Schedule send/receive times

46. Schedule send/receive times

47. Future Research
 We need more usable/minable data. Create an email collection
system that sits at the server level and collects anonymized
data to create a corpus for researchers.
 Knowledge management science to replace our existing and
unfitting industrialist management science
 Productivity vs. Acceleration
 Attention self-manipulation: what and why do people
repurpose tools to deal with perceived overload? Do they
realize the harmful effects?
 UI’s to break the message inbox
and line item metaphors.