Tag Archives: information overload

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Wow, what a fantastic year 2012 has been! So much has happened and so much has changed in just the last 365 days that I can barely believe it, and all for the better. A quick recap is in order, just so that I can reflect on all the many things that have transpired and affected me and my family for the better.

Information Overload and Email Overload

  • It was just one year ago that I came upon the idea of “fixing email” for my masters capstone project, and wrote my first post about it, “Email is broken and it’s time to fix it.” I launched head first into the fascinating world of information overload, email overload, technostress, user interface experiments, and so much more.
  • Interestingly, a few months later I wrote “Email is not broken, we are,” the most popular post on the blog that was carried to #3 on Hacker News and represents in a (very small) nutshell how my attitude toward email overload had changed.
  • I attended Overloaded 2012, a conference focused on information overload hosted by the Information Overload Resource Group, and met so many great and interesting people there, all engaged in trying to help solve this problem. This was a huge launching point for me and has resulted in so many great connections, ideas, and relationships.
  • In fact, I was very honored to be invited to participate on the steering committee of IORG, and am now helping to organize Overloaded 2013, set to take place February 9, 2013! It is going to be a banner conference, so come and attend!

Education

  • After five solid years I graduated with both my masters and bachelor degrees in Information Systems, from Brigham Young University. Absolutely fantastic program (ranked #8 nationally) that gave me a very good mix of both business and technical skills. The BYU IS program is incredibly unique among MIS programs in the United States because of it’s elevated expectations and very strong technical emphasis. I graduated with a business degree from a top B-school, and also have technical skills higher than many, if not most, other IS graduates, and on par even with some CS students.
  • Was in the top 10% of my class, and selected as the Outstanding Student of the masters program by the faculty. The credit, however, does not go to me—it goes to the professors who offered me exceptional opportunities and took special interest in helping me develop my talents and passions. It also goes to my God, who has given me everything, and to my wife, who was so amazingly supportive.
  • Was able to participate in the planning and first stages of execution of a research project examining behavioral adjustments when justification is required. This was a very neat opportunity for me to put the skills I had learned taking pre-Ph.D. courses to work, and furthered my desire to eventually pursue doctoral work.

Personal Life and Career

  • Our little boy went from barely being able to roll over on his stomach to a little guy who is running left and right in our house, only ever sits still for three seconds at a time, and has a speaking vocabulary that is expanding past 20 words! Holy cow! Carson, what an amazing 16 months it has been, watching you learn and grow.
  • We are now expecting our second, a little girl, and we are so excited. I have no idea how to raise a little girl, and it scares me, but I’m going to do my best and love her so much.
  • Started a great job as a technology consultant with Pariveda Solutions. It is amazing to be able to work with creme of the crop people every day, people who are smart but also care about helping out anyone in the firm who may need a hand. It is rare to find so many people of this sort all in one organization.
  • Moved to Denver, had a great time, and now moving on to Houston. Wow, two major moves in less than a year, crazy! But all for the best, and great opportunities.
  • Got to see my wife’s blog, The Game Gal, grow steadily over the year, and have her very first 10,000+ visitor day on the last day, New Years Eve. It is very interesting to see the people that she is able to help through her blog, especially ESL teachers and students, and those working with children. She has such great content, and she does all the art herself, I am so proud of her!
  • I set a goal/New Years resolution last January 1st that I would read my scriptures every single day in 2012—and I did. Some days it was literally only a couple of verses, but many days it was a much deep and profound study session, and I gained so much from it. This has been wonderful, and I am continuing this in 2013.

And that is only a smattering of the incredible things that have happened in this past year. How blessed and lucky I am! I only hope that I can take all of these great experiences and use them to help out others as well, whether it be my own family or strangers on the Internet.

2012 was fantastic, and I am so excited about 2013. I already have a post formulating in my mind of what I want to accomplish in this coming year, and I will post that tomorrow. But needless to say, you only go faster and farther when you try harder and stronger. There is no plateauing in life, only forward or backward progress. May we all make forward progress in 2013, and may it be a wonderful year for everyone.

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Recently I have had a curious question nagging at me that would have profound impacts on the way that we work with and around information. How do we determine the value of information, or what heuristics do we use to evaluate the worth of some information to us? Whether it be valued in terms of time, money, health changes, etc., we certainly make subconscious decisions regarding the ROI to consume a bit of information. I am wondering what facets others use to make this judgement call.

If you have personal anecdotes, thoughts, or resources, I’d love to hear of them. In the meantime, I am going to be looking into what has been uncovered in this area, and pursue what we can discover going forward.

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Whew, graduating, moving, and starting a new job all take an incredibly large amount of time! There is a ton of material that I still want to get up regarding the information overload research that I did in my last semester, but I just haven’t had the chance. However, I can at least get my final presentation up so that others can at least peruse it.

Email Overload
View more presentations from jlyman

Now this presentation is really meant to be accompanied by my narration, so it won’t be nearly as rich just reading through it as it currently exists. However, it should at least give a starting point to the conversation, and include some good resources to jump off from.

Please let me know what questions you may have, and if you need the narration along with it. I’m happy to discuss any and all of this material!

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Over the last several months I have been pouring over as many different research articles as I could in order to get a handle of what has already been done, discovered, and discussed in relation to information overload and email overload. Luckily, some fantastic researchers both in academia and industry have been busy studying out the problem to a great extent.

I want to share at least some of the best snippets I have found, and especially the particular papers that I have found helpful. I’m not exactly sure how I want to disseminate this information, other than I know that I want it out there, so I’m going to start with a very simple PDF file and text bibliography. I may expand it in the future if I can find a better way to communicate it. For now, I hope that others looking for good, solid research will be able to use this as a good resource for information and email overload. Oh, and for now it also includes my personal notes and thoughts, so you can just ignore that column if you want. :)

Email Overload Literature Review (PDF)

Bibliography:

Ayyagari, R., Grover, V., & Purvis, R. (2011). TECHNOSTRESS: TECHNOLOGICAL ANTECEDENTS AND IMPLICATIONS. MIS Quarterly, 35(4), 831-858. Retrieved from http://www.misq.org/skin/frontend/default/misq/pdf/appendices/2011/AyyagariGroverPurvisAppendices.pdf

Bellotti, V., Ducheneaut, N., & Howard, M. (2005). Quality versus quantity: E-mail-centric task management and its relation with overload. Human-Computer Interaction, 20, 89-138. Retrieved from http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1466574

Dabbish, L. A., & Kraut, R. E. (2006). Email overload at work: An analysis of factors associated with email strain. CSCW ’06 Computer Supported Cooperative Work (pp. 431-440). Banff, Alberta, Canada. Retrieved from http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1180941

Ducheneaut, N., & Watts, L. A. (2005). In search of coherence: a review of e-mail research. Human-Computer Interaction, 20, 11-48. Retrieved from http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1466572

Fisher, D., Brush, A., Gleave, E., & Smith, M. A. (2006). Revisiting Whittaker & Sidner’s “Email Overload” ten years later. CSCW ’06 Computer Supported Cooperative Work (pp. 309-312). Banff, Alberta, Canada. Retrieved from http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1180922

Gupta, A., Sharda, R., & Greve, R. a. (2010). You’ve got email! Does it really matter to process emails now or later? Information Systems Frontiers, 13(5), 637-653. doi:10.1007/s10796-010-9242-4

Gupta, A., Sharda, R., Ducheneaut, N., Zhao, J. L., & Weber, R. (2006). E-mail Management: A Techno-Managerial Research Perspective. Communications of the Association for Information Systems, 17, 941-961.

Hemp, P. (2009). Death by information overload. Harvard Business Review, 87(9), 83–89. Harvard Business School Publication Corp. Retrieved from http://ocvets4pets.com/archive21/Death_by_Information_Overload_-_HBR.org.pdf

Hogan, B., & Fisher, D. (2006). A scale for measuring email overload. Microsoft Research, 7-9. Retrieved from http://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&btnG=Search&q=intitle:A+Scale+for+Measuring+Email+Overload#0

Iqbal, S. T., & Horvitz, E. (2007). Disruption and recovery of computing tasks: field study, analysis, and directions. Proceedings of the SIGCHI conference on Human factors in computing systems (pp. 677–686). ACM. Retrieved from http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1240624.1240730

Paul, S., & Nazareth, D. L. (2010). Input information complexity, perceived time pressure, and information processing in GSS-based work groups: An experimental investigation using a decision schema to alleviate information overload conditions. Decision Support Systems, 49(1), 31-40. Elsevier B.V. doi:10.1016/j.dss.2009.12.007

Tyler, J. R., & Tang, J. C. (2003). When can I expect an email response? A study of rhythms in email usage. Proceedings of the eighth conference on European Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work (pp. 239–258). Kluwer Academic Publishers. Retrieved from http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1241902

Wattenberg, M., Rohall, S. L., Gruen, D., & Kerr, B. (2005). E-mail research: targeting the enterprise. Human-Computer Interaction, 20(1), 139–162. L. Erlbaum Associates Inc. Retrieved from http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1466575

Whittaker, S. (2005). Supporting collaborative task management in e-mail. Human-Computer Interaction, 20(1), 49–88. L. Erlbaum Associates Inc. Retrieved from http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1466573

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There seems to be a constant flow of “email is/is not broken” articles on HN and various other places. Some of them are very business-oriented, and some of them are scathing rejections (language). But most of them miss the point. Email as a system is not broken, but we, through our email behaviors, are broken.

Nearly all of the articles written recently about fixing email have concentrated on technology and building a better client or implementing the specs more closely or bringing two systems together. These are all great ideas and have a ton of value, but they will not fix the inherent issue that people are experiencing with email, but which most articles fail to articulate: we think email is broken because we are overwhelmed by it and get less real work done because of it.

So instead of asking how we can make email better/faster/cooler, we need to ask ourselves how we can get more work done while still using email. Unfortunately, many experiences have shown over the past decade or so that this problem is not easily solved by new technology, as much as I would love that. It is solved by teaching people better email behaviors. This is certainly a less sexy solution, but guess what? It’s the attainable one. Here are some ideas that I’ve come across from others, and that warrant further investigation. They are all designed to help us get more real work done, which is the real problem with the email timesink.

  • Stop checking email continuously and turn off desktop alerts. It is absolutely ridiculous that we allow Outlook to check email every 5 minutes, allow our phone to get push messages, or keep a Gmail tab open all the time. This is absolutely killing us in terms of productivity. In 90% of all cases we don’t need to know immediately that there is a new message. Segmenting our email checking time into 2, 4, or 8 times a day has massive benefits. We greatly reduce task-switching penalties, and removing the alerts so we’re not tempted goes a huge way. See this post for more details.
  • Set up a social contract with your colleagues. Several posts have mentioned that email has moved beyond its original purpose, which is true. However, we can still use it. But we cannot continue to use it with everyone having different expectations for its reply rate. We have imbued in email the urgency and rapidity of a telephone call, and that is not good because we cannot handle it in the same way as a telephone call. At work or among your close colleagues, people need to understand and respect how others treat response times. If one person feels that email should be responded to within 2 hours and another within 8-24, there will be obvious pain points. Let those around you know your expectations and respect theirs. Deal with differences as a human being, meaning walking over to or calling someone if you know that their typical response time isn’t fast enough for your issue. This is an area where small new tech could be very beneficial: when composing a message to someone, have an indicator of how soon they are likely to respond, given their own “social contract” and typical patterns.
  • Productivity vs Acceleration. This idea comes from David Levy, who notes that in our society we have confused productivity with acceleration, or getting more things done faster. Productivity should actually be more like getting the right things done better. When using email, sending tons of short, not fully formed messages is killing us. We need to take the time to construct useful, productive messages, something most of us are not doing. Levy notes that “‘timeout’ is a punishment because of our focus on productivity in our society.” Ouch.

There’s a whole lot more that could be said on the matter, but I want to help reframe this discussion of “email is broken” by helping everyone realize that it is not the tech that is broken, but the fact that the tech is not helping us get our primary tasks and work done because of our behaviors using it. I am also very excited for the tech that is coming to help fix this, but I also firmly believe that the majority of the solution lies in helping people to better understand how to use the technology in a better way to help us as human beings communicate and get work done. This is certainly a big issue to me, and I hope we make a lot of progress on the matter.

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