Email Dashboard

I spoke w/ a reporter the other day who asked me what I think the top trends in email are going to be over the next year.  All of the points I mentioned were things I feel are required to combat the two biggest problems with email today – a continued increase in the volumes of email people receive and  the continued shift of emails from being simple pieces of information (a replacement for memos) into time and resource intensive documents (a sort of lightweight project management system).  Here are the two I felt were most important and likely to become major trends over the next year.

The first trend I see starting already is a push towards more and more software automation of email processing.  At ClearContext we’re focused on automating as much of this as possible (prioritizing the email, linking the email to associated tasks/appts/etc., automatic filing and categorization of messages, and much more) for Microsoft Outlook users.  A number of tools companies like Claritude are emerging to help deal with the sheer volume of email people receive – Claritude’s tool focuses on allowing people to file messages as quickly as possible.  Zimbra, an open source messaging provider, has an interesting take on this with Zimlets.  By allowing developers to link external data directly to emails in their system, users can do things like view driving directions for an address from within that email window.  These are just a couple of examples out of numerous companies I could mention that are all addressing what I see as the same fundamental challenge – helping users process through each individual email as quickly as possible.

The second trend I think will become more and more common over the next year or two is companies putting email usage policies in place for their employees.  Even the best productivity methodologies and software products can’t solve the fundamental problem of people having more to do in a day than they have time to get done.  Obviously, project plans, schedules, task lists and similar tracking mechanisms help organizations manage this.  However, as email becomes more and more widely used across all sorts of companies, becoming not only the default communication mode for many, but also the default mode via which to request assistance, updates, and assign tasks, the info in those tracking mechanisms is easily prone to becoming out-of-date.  One major issue in the shift from phone communications to email communications by a lot of people is the fact that individuals are now able to generate far greater demands on other people’s time while using far less of their own.  What do I mean by that?  Well, if I want to get an update on a customer account from you over the phone that takes 15 minutes, it will take up 15 minutes of both of our time.  So, I am forced to be aware of how much time I am requesting from you.  On the other hand, I can in a few seconds email you requesting you to email me an update about that account.  This type of thing can easily spiral out of control within companies and keep people from being able to focus on their core objectives.  I predict that more and more companies will develop email usage guidelines and policies for their employees as more and more employee time gets sucked up by ad-hoc tasks coming to them over email.

Scoble today wrote about losing the battle against email and being unable to keep up – he currently has over 1500 emails he needs to deal with.  As I responded with a couple of ideas to help him out (Ten a day and my email mgmt strategy) it hit me that being successful at taking and keeping control of email is really just the same as any other major focus area in our lives that requires discipline and commitment.

Losing weight.
Running a marathon.
Getting stronger at the gym.
Eating healthy.

All of these are things that are not inherently complicated or tough to achieve with proper discipline, commitment, and motivation.  But so many people struggle with trying to succeed at these tasks.  Why is that?  Often it’s because these goals simply aren’t made a priority in their lives.

Keeping on top of email is exactly the same thing.  If you don’t make it a priority, create a strategy to keep control of your email, and stick to that strategy, you will find yourself losing control again.  And as Robert alludes to, getting behind on email can result in so many other problems nowadays – missing appointments, deadlines, etc.  As I wrote previously, Email is real work and needs to be treated and scheduled for as such.  Carve out time to deal with email and make that as much of a priority as getting any other task done.

I challenge anyone who is having trouble staying on top of their email to set a simple goal.  Have 300 less emails in your inbox (or wherever you keep your pending emails) in one month.  See how many emails you have in your inbox.  Don’t end your workday each day until that number is ten less than the day before.  Stick to this and I am confident many of you will be reducing at a rate of far more than 10 per day soon, and more importantly, will be on the path towards staying in control of your email.

Now if I can just keep on top of writing for my blog more consistently (like writing up my additional thoughts on beta programs I’ve been putting off for far too long)…

Or, more simply, how I manage my day.

There’s a lot of information out there about email and task management strategies, but many (if not most) of this info is pretty general and focused on high-level strategies and techniques.  I’m going to get much more specific and simply describe how on a daily basis I manage all of my incoming email and associated tasks that get generated.  On a typical day I receive between 100-200 emails.   I usually have 30-50 emails in my inbox when I start the day.  Probably 50 or so of my emails throughout the day are important and require some sort of response/action.  I use a set of techniques that draw from GTD, Total Workday Control, functionality provided by ClearContext IMS, techniques from tons of blogger posts, and tips I’ve come up with over the years to keep my day under control.  With that said, on to the routine:

1. Check the calendar.  This sort of structures the day in my head.  I use a calendar view from Michael Linenberger’s TWC that also displays my current and overdue tasks.  So, at a glance, I have a quick idea of what my day is going to be like.  Sounds silly and simple, but I find this to be a helpful thing to do first thing.

2. I have a handful of newsletters that I review every day (VentureWire, Ferris Research news, a few other daily/weekly ones).  ClearContext AutoAssign rules tags them with a topic name.  I take a quick glance at them and then hit either File (and ClearContext automatically files them to the appropriate folder) or Delete.  I generally spend less than 5 minutes total on this step.

3. I then have a variety of sales reports, sales activity, and support threads that I’m copied on.  All of these are automatically tagged with topics as well.   These are generally just for review and don’t require any action by me.  I take a quick scan of these and see if there’s anything I want to actually jump into, then hit File Topic to file all of them into the appropriate folders.  This takes about 5-15 minutes depending on the nature of the emails that day.

4. Next I review all the stuff at the bottom of new email that ClearContext has colored black or grey.  Most spam is already filtered out, this stuff generally consists of a couple of spam messages that snuck in plus random crap from companies like Dell, United, AA, etc.  It takes all of about 1 minute to take a quick scan of all this stuff and hit delete.

5. I next look at the remaining emails and spend 10-15 minutes responding to everything I know I will be able to provide a quick response to.  90+% of the time I know from the sender/subject which emails will be like this and which ones will require more time.

6. Now I move into what I really like about the GTD system.  I hit the ClearContext Task button and create tasks for all emails that require some real action besides a simple response.  Also I can hit the ClearContext Schedule button to create appointments.  The benefit of ClearContext IMS here is that these tasks/appointments are automatically linked to the email threads, so when I get around to doing these things, I can look at the ClearContext RelatedView to see all related messages and tasks/appointments.  The GTD technique of creating tasks and moving these emails out of the inbox definitely helps me stay more organized and have an accurate idea of what my workload is really like.

7. I typically next have one or two lengthy responses that I need to get to.  By going through the prior steps, I manage to very quickly get through a lot of small tasks rather than get caught up in any longer tasks at the start of my day, which can lead to a lot of things getting backed up.

8. After going through these steps, I’m generally left with only a couple of new unhandled emails in my inbox that I’ll need to do something with later in the day.

9. Throughout the day, on about an hourly basis (ok, every 20-30 minutes), I check my email.  I have Outlook set up so I need to hit send/receive to get new email.  By doing that, when I’m involved in a very focused task, I get to concentrate on that without my email indicator popping up and tempting me to get distracted.  When I do check email, I only pay attention to the email that ClearContext has prioritized as "Normal" or higher and ignore all lower priority email until later.  This week’s TicketWeb and Independent concert lists can probably wait until later.

10. Every few hours I’ll take a quick scan of all my email including the lower priority stuff and file/delete/process as appropriate.

11. At the end of the day, I review all pending tasks and either complete them or reprioritize them. I try to stay pretty on top of this and try to be realistic about when I’m really going to have time to address something.

12. The next end of day task I do is look at how many messages are in my inbox.  If my inbox has grown from the day before, I make myself handle a few more emails before calling it a day.  RIght now this means that my Inbox stays between 20-25 emails.  Hopefully I’ll get that to zero soon.

13. Finally, once (ok, three times) in the evening/night I check my email and respond to some late emails, sort of a head start on the next day’s processing.

I’ve been using this specific process for a number of months now, and for one of the first times in a long time I feel like I’m really on top of what I need to get done, am very responsive to others, and don’t feel constantly behind or overwhelmed.  Hopefully some of these techniques will be helpful for your specific day-to-day email and task management needs, and perhaps some of you will share some of your own personal strategies.

Interesting WSJ article on how your email management techniques say a lot about you.  A few interesting quotes:

"We’re
discovering that the disorder in our inboxes mirrors the disorder in
our homes, marriages and checkbooks."

"When you’re quick to respond with
offers of help, ‘people use email to turn their crisis into your
emergency,’ she says."

"If you have 1,000 emails
in your inbox, it may mean you don’t want to miss an opportunity, but
there are things you can’t pull the trigger on," Dr. Greenfield says.
"If you have only 10 emails in your inbox, you may be pulling the
trigger too fast and missing the richness of life."

The article is definitely worth reading and a lot of it rings true.  For those of you who fit somewhere in the middle of the two extremes, I hope you’ll give my 10-a-day suggestion a try.

Alright, I guess this implies more tips to come, so hopefully I can figure some out.  And sometime in the near future I’m going to write a lengthy description of my personal email management techniques.

But, in the meantime, here’s a simple tip I used to help get my email life under control.  I just looked at my inbox a while back (at the time it had about 400 emails in it that required some type of action – a response, a task, filing, followup, whatever) and gave myself a simple goal: I would end every day with ten less emails in my inbox than the day before.

I actually beat that goal by a bit, and after a month my Inbox was down to about 20 and lately has been floating between 20 and 30.  I do have intentions of getting it down to empty, but the difference in stress reduction and time savings already is amazing to me.  I’m not sure how much is real improvement and how much is psychological, but my workday is just so much smoother with an inbox like this.

Now, some of you have 10,000 emails sitting in your inbox and will have to wait until I write a much broader scope email management post.  But for those of you who have 100-1000 emails in your inbox, I hope you give this simple task a try.  It’s very easy to stick to and the benefits are amazing.

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.