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

Identifying Temporal Rhythms using Email Traces

In the past, work was governed by the natural rhythms of the physical world, but organizations increasingly distribute their work along the temporal dimension. This leads to varying temporal rhythms, which depict recurring patterns of activity in time, among workers, enabled by communication and collaboration technologies. The routine use of technology generates activity log data called digital traces, which promise an opportunity for a data-driven inquiry into temporal rhythms. While research using digital traces is scarce, various vendors claim to identify daily working hours based on email traces. Our study explores the use of email traces for an inquiry into daily and weekly temporal rhythms by triangulating quantitative results with interviews. Contrary to the vendors’ claims, our results show that the usefulness of email traces is limited to identifying aggregated and stable temporal rhythms

Asynchronous Remote Medical Consultation for Ghana

Computer-mediated communication systems can be used to bridge the gap between doctors in underserved regions with local shortages of medical expertise and medical specialists worldwide. To this end, we describe the design of a prototype remote consultation system intended to provide the social, institutional and infrastructural context for sustained, self-organizing growth of a globally-distributed Ghanaian medical community. The design is grounded in an iterative design process that included two rounds of extended design fieldwork throughout Ghana and draws on three key design principles (social networks as a framework on which to build incentives within a self-organizing network; optional and incremental integration with existing referral mechanisms; and a weakly-connected, distributed architecture that allows for a highly interactive, responsive system despite failures in connectivity). We discuss initial experiences from an ongoing trial deployment in southern Ghana.Comment: 10 page

Encounters on the social web: Everyday life and emotions online

Encounters also happen online nowadays and, yes, they are still difficult to describe, even though it is sometimes easier to observe them-and obtain data about them- than in the past. The internet is crucially 'shaping the interactions people have with one another' (Johns 2010: 499). With the recent explosion and popularity of Web 2.0 services and the social web, such as Facebook (FB), Twitter, and various other types of social media, internet users now have at their disposal an unprecedented collection of tools to interact with others. These modes of online sociability allow users to pursue social encounters with variable levels of involvement, attention, and activity (Papacharissi and Mendelson 2010). For many of us it is now difficult to imagine our social relationships without access to the internet. The social web plays an important role in relationships among internet users (Boyd 2006), with the expression, management and experience of emotions being key to the maintenance of these relationships

Email as co-habitat in distributed organisations

Email has now become so ubiquitous that it has surpassed its early role as an asynchronous communication tool. Having contributed to the rise of the distributed organisation, email is being used in diverse ways and for purposes for which it was not intended. It is no longer a technology of individual habitats, but one where members of distributed organisations co-habit. This paper charts the study of email management, from early investigations of personal approaches to handling email overload, through to a review of software applications designed to ameliorate this. It suggests that while email has been appropriated for information and knowledge management, there has been minimal analysis of this beyond the individual. Therefore, it presents a case study of a distributed organisation, detailing the process by which email was leveraged for organisational knowledge through the design of an application that enabled visualisation of email data

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

Antidepressants, circadian rhythms, and cognition: The effects of SSRIs and SNRIs on circadian rhythms and cognitive performance

It has been well documented that individuals with depression commonly experience sleep disturbances. Decreased sleep quality, diminished sleep efficiency, and increased nighttime awakenings are all typical ailments. Deficits in cognitive functioning often co-occur, including impairments in working memory, learning, inhibition, and set shifting. Many studies have found that upon taking antidepressants (i.e. serotonin agonists), individuals with depression experience normalized sleep and cognitive performance. The impact of antidepressants, especially SSRIs and SNRIs, on sleep stages, particularly REM and slow wave sleep, has been the subject of numerous studies. However, there is currently very limited literature that examines their impact on sleep quality and no literature examining circadian rhythm entrainment. The purpose of the present study was to extend current literature by exploring the effects of antidepressants, specifically SSRIs and SNRIs, on circadian rhythms, entrainment, and cognitive performance. Participants consisted of JMU graduate students who were either taking antidepressants or not taking antidepressants. All participants wore actigraphs and completed morning and evening sleep journals for two consecutive weeks to measure sleep parameters. Cognitive performance was assessed via the Automated Neuropsychological Assessment Metrics (ANAM). No significant differences in sleep parameters, circadian entrainment, or cognitive performance were found between groups. However, within the antidepressant group, years of antidepressant use and dosage demonstrated predictive qualities for certain cognitive measures, and time of antidepressant use predictive qualities for TST and time spent in bed

Walking Through Jelly: Language Proficiency, Emotions, and Disrupted Collaboration in Global Work

In an ethnographic study comprised of interviews and concurrent observations of 145 globally distributed members of nine project teams of an organization, we found that uneven proficiency in English, the lingua franca, disrupted collaboration for both native and non-native speakers. Although all team members spoke English, different levels of fluency contributed to tensions on these teams. As non-native English speakers attempted to counter the apprehension they felt when having to speak English and native English speakers fought against feeling excluded and devalued, a cycle of negative emotion ensued and disrupted interpersonal relationships on these teams. We describe in detail how emotions and actions evolved recursively as coworkers sought to relieve themselves of negative emotions prompted by the lingua franca mandate and inadvertently behaved in ways that triggered negative responses in distant coworkers. Our results add to the scant literature on the role of emotions in collaborative relationships in organizations and suggest that organizational policies can set in motion a cycle of negative emotions that interfere with collaborative work.

The Recent History of Seasonal Affective Disorder (SAD)

Seminar TranscriptPsychiatric diagnosis is controversial and is regarded by some principally as a means of reinforcing the vested interests of medical professionals and pharmaceutical companies. On the other hand, the phenomena that are described in clinical psychiatric practice are real and clearly extend across time and between cultures. ‘In every culture there is some notion of emotional or psychological difference. Not all cultures identify these differences in the same way, nor do they use identical terms. Equally, however no culture is indifferent to those who are sad, frightened or unintelligible in their conduct.’ 1 The description and diagnosis of Seasonal Affective Disorder (SAD) or ‘winter depression’ is a comparatively recent development which provides an unrivalled opportunity to explore the construction of a psychopathological entity through the relevant peer-reviewed publications, as well as the professional and public reaction to these scientific discoveries. This Witness Seminar provides a riveting insight into the thinking of some key protagonists, both the scientists who developed the diagnosis of SAD as well as those for whom this new clinical entity resonated so clearly with their own experiences. What is the point of diagnosis? Ideally a diagnosis should point to a particular disease process, though even in general medicine this is often not the case. However, in a pragmatic sense the value of diagnosis is that it enables a group of people manifesting particular clinical phenomena to be identified as sharing a common prognosis and response to treatment – in the case of SAD a therapeutic response to artificial bright light. Indeed with SAD, it may be that increasing knowledge about the circadian effects of bright light stimulated a search for medical conditions in which it might be effective, that is, in some sense the availability of a treatment led to the identification of the condition. How truly recent is the identification of SAD as a diagnostic entity? In fact, seasonal variation in mood disorder has long been recognized and Rosenthal and colleagues (1984) quote the eminent nineteenth-century psychiatrist, Emil Kraepelin, as commenting in his standard textbook: ‘Repeatedly I saw in these cases moodiness set in in autumn and pass over in spring ... corresponding in a certain sense to the emotional changes which come over even healthy individuals at the changes of the seaso