Email overload in academia

The emergence of email as a viable and inexpensive communication channel has led to its increased presence in the daily lives of professionals. Email has become a ubiquitous tool in a faster paced and more globally connected world. Besides simple notes, professionals now use email to communicate tasks, important personal and organizational announcements, meeting requests, and share documents. As the importance of email has grown, professionals have made the email client a work nerve center. The vast increase in the volume of email and the use of the email client as a multifunctional tool now threatens the productivity gains it once created. Business professionals suffer from email overload which is accompanied by stress and organizational breakdowns. As a result, many organizations have created email free holidays and professionals have declared email bankruptcy. In this thesis the research on email overload is reviewed, analyzed, and extended through a study of email overload in academia. Using surveys and interviews of faculty at a large university, the researcher found that email overload was present in academia. The study also identified participants’ behaviors in performing email triage, managing email and email overload, and the effects of email overload. The researcher was also able to discover characteristics of cyclical email volumes amongst faculty which may have a direct impact on determining methods of email organization and the occurrence of email overload. Additionally, the study identified that faculty have extended their email client ever further by using it as a task and project manager, information manager, workload barometer, and headline aggregator

Characterizing and Predicting Email Deferral Behavior

Email triage involves going through unhandled emails and deciding what to do with them. This familiar process can become increasingly challenging as the number of unhandled email grows. During a triage session, users commonly defer handling emails that they cannot immediately deal with to later. These deferred emails, are often related to tasks that are postponed until the user has more time or the right information to deal with them. In this paper, through qualitative interviews and a large-scale log analysis, we study when and what enterprise email users tend to defer. We found that users are more likely to defer emails when handling them involves replying, reading carefully, or clicking on links and attachments. We also learned that the decision to defer emails depends on many factors such as user's workload and the importance of the sender. Our qualitative results suggested that deferring is very common, and our quantitative log analysis confirms that 12% of triage sessions and 16% of daily active users had at least one deferred email on weekdays. We also discuss several deferral strategies such as marking emails as unread and flagging that are reported by our interviewees, and illustrate how such patterns can be also observed in user logs. Inspired by the characteristics of deferred emails and contextual factors involved in deciding if an email should be deferred, we train a classifier for predicting whether a recently triaged email is actually deferred. Our experimental results suggests that deferral can be classified with modest effectiveness. Overall, our work provides novel insights about how users handle their emails and how deferral can be modeled

You\u27ve got mail: Accountability and end user attitudes to email management

In a pioneering ethnographic study of end user responses to the problem of ‘information overload’ Whittaker and Sidner (1996) found that the design of systems primarily as methods of asynchronous communication, posed significant information management problems for users. In another contemporaneous study, David Bearman (1993) extended understanding of the implications of end user email management behavior by identifying significant accountability implications for organizations arising from the use of email. Recent case studies in the United States and Australia (Leopold, 2008; Raleigh Chronicle, 2008; Strutt, and Taylor, 2007) have once again focused attention on the accountability consequences for Government of email management. Employing elements of Whittaker and Sidner’s (1996) typology, in a research design involving quantitative and case study methods, this study explores end user attitudes and behavior in email management with consequences for Australian Government accountability in an era of e-Government. The paper addresses the need of information policy makers, Chief Information Officers (CIOs) and information and records managers to be informed about current vectors in compliant email management

Email stress and its management in public sector organisations

Email stress: what are its causes? how is it measured? can it be solved? The literature review revealed that, despite the term being well used and recognised, discussions surrounding the root cause of email stress had reached little consensus and the concept was not well understood. By its very nature, email stress theory had fallen victim to the academic debate between psychological vs. physiological interpretations of stress which, as a result of either choice, limited more progressive research. Likewise an array of email management strategies had been identified however, whilst some generated quick successes, they appeared to suffer longevity issues and were not maintained a few months after implementation in the workplace. The purpose of this research was to determine whether email communication causes employees psychological and physiological stress and investigate the impact of email management strategies in the workplace. A pragmatic philosophy placed the research problem as central and valued the differences between paradigms to promote a mixed-method approach to research. The decision to pair both case studies and action research methods ensured a framework for presenting results and an actionable solution was achieved. In direct response to the research aims an original email stress measuring methodology was devised that combined various data collection tools to measure and investigate email stress. This research design was applied and evaluated ‘email free time’ and email filing at the '''''''''''' '''''''''''''''''''''''''. Results of the study showed an increased stress response to occur during email use, i.e. caused employees’ increased blood pressure, heart rate, cortisol and perceived stress, and a number of adverse effects such as managing staff via email, social detachment, blame and cover-yourback culture were identified. Findings revealed ‘email free time’ was not a desirable strategy to manage email stress and related stressors, whereas email filing was found more beneficial to workers well-being. Consolidation of the data gathered from the literature review and research findings were used to develop an initial conceptualisation of email stress in the form of two models, i.e. explanatory and action. A focus group was conducted to validate the proposed models and a further investigation at the '''''''''''''''''''' ''''''''''''' was carried out to critique the use of an email training intervention. The results showed some improvements to employees’ behaviour after the training, e.g. improved writing style, email checked on fewer occasions each day and fewer sufferers of email addiction. The initial models devised, alongside the latter findings, were synthesised to create a single integrative multidimensional model of email stress and management strategies. The model made an original contribution to knowledge in terms of theory, i.e. to conceptualise email stress, and practice, i.e. to offer practical solutions to the email worker

Evolution of Conversations in the Age of Email Overload

Email is a ubiquitous communications tool in the workplace and plays an important role in social interactions. Previous studies of email were largely based on surveys and limited to relatively small populations of email users within organizations. In this paper, we report results of a large-scale study of more than 2 million users exchanging 16 billion emails over several months. We quantitatively characterize the replying behavior in conversations within pairs of users. In particular, we study the time it takes the user to reply to a received message and the length of the reply sent. We consider a variety of factors that affect the reply time and length, such as the stage of the conversation, user demographics, and use of portable devices. In addition, we study how increasing load affects emailing behavior. We find that as users receive more email messages in a day, they reply to a smaller fraction of them, using shorter replies. However, their responsiveness remains intact, and they may even reply to emails faster. Finally, we predict the time to reply, length of reply, and whether the reply ends a conversation. We demonstrate considerable improvement over the baseline in all three prediction tasks, showing the significant role that the factors that we uncover play, in determining replying behavior. We rank these factors based on their predictive power. Our findings have important implications for understanding human behavior and designing better email management applications for tasks like ranking unread emails.Comment: 11 page, 24th International World Wide Web Conferenc

Effective means of improving email communication

Email communication has become an integral part of the communication structure within organisations, but the problems it can cause are rarely assessed. The defects associated with email, which are related to both the quantity and the quality of email need to be understood by employees for them to become more effective users of email. Email training within organisations tends to focus on how to use email as a software package, without looking at when it is appropriate to use email and how to get your message across effectively. This thesis first explores email defects and how they impact on organisations. [Continues.

Can Seminar and Computer-Based Training Improve the Effectiveness of Electronic Mail Communication within the Workplace?

Email communication has become an integral part of the communication structure within organisations. However, we are far from efficient in using this organisational communication and knowledge sharing tool. We aim to improve workplace communications by improving the way email is used within the workplace. We undertake extensive two-phase research to demonstrate the need to give employees training regarding email communication, and conduct both seminar based training and computer-based training. Findings indicate that email training can lead to significant improvements in the way that employees use email within the workplace with computer-based training (or e-learning) showing a greater improvement. This study demonstrates that while email is a powerful organisational and knowledge tool, it can be optimised to better leverage its benefits by training employees in its us

Why Forwarded Email Threads are Hard to Read: The Email Format as an Antecedent of Email Overload

Research has shown that excessive email use leads to feelings of being overwhelmed and stressed. Existing coping solutions, which mitigate email overload, address the number of emails and, in consequence, the time spent on emails. These approaches are congruent with existing research on antecedents of email overload. Further coping solutions include addressing email threads. However, we lack a theoretical grounding for perceiving email threads as an antecedent of email overload. I suggest cognitive load theory as a means of investigating the format of forwarded email threads in an experiment. I found support for the effects on reading time and performance in terms of correct answers per second, findings that confirm that forwarded email threads are an antecedent of email overload and that we need a new conceptualization of email overload

Perception and Use of E-mail: A Case Study in Universiti Utara Malaysia

E-mail has grown out to become as one of the most successful and frequently used computer applications since it was invented. It can be used to communicate faster, easier, and at a lower cost with everyone all over the world. Besides providing flexibility and improving the quality of communication, researchers acknowledged that there are many problems faced by e-mail users, namely repeating emails, spam e-mails, huge size attachment files, and insufficient storage size. A case study was conducted to investigate on Universiti Utara Malaysia staff’s perception and use of e-mail in order to improve the e-mail service provided to them. This paper discusses the findings from the study, which involves 958 staff. There were five phases involved in this study, which are instrument design, sampling, pilot study, data collection for real survey, and analysis. Self-administered questionnaires were used to gather the data, while descriptive statistical analysis was used for data analysis. The findings of the study reveal that UUM staff appreciate the e-mail service. However, they faced problems such as limited storage size and overwhelming number of e-mails. They believed that the UUM e-mail system is being abused as observed from the repeating advertisements and news sent to them. The output of this study can be used as a guideline by the UUM management in revising its e-mail policy so as to improve the quality of its e-mail service