Complaining about overcrowded inboxes is a staple of the modern age. But our recent TechLines broadcast raised an interesting point: is it actually a useful warning sign that you need to improve your working methods?
In the first segment of the Techlines broadcast, embedded above, futurist Mark Pesce raises the notion that we don’t get around to analysing how effectively we filter information until the point when it becomes problematic. “We only improve our focus when we get overloaded,” he notes. And while feeling overloaded is never appealing, it can the cue to look not just at how we deal with email, but the processes involved in our working lives.
That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t expect technology to help with the task. The thing we need to be careful of is not pushing it back on the end user,” Alistair Rennie, general manager for IBM Lotus, points out. “The system ought to be smart enough.”
Do you view email overload as a cue to get better organised, or does it just raise your blood pressure? Tell us in the comments. (If you want to watch the entire TechLines show, you can catch it here, or see the 30 minute highlight version.)
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Stever Robbins
September 9, 2010 at 9:54 PM
“Email overload is a sign that you may need to improve your email habits.” That sounds logical on the face of it, and it certainly may be true. But it’s deeply flawed.
An overflowing garbage can may be a sign that you aren’t taking out the garbage enough. But you control how much physical stuff comes into your life, so it’s reasonable that you should be able to process it at the same rate.
With email, that’s not the case. You don’t control how much email you use; everyone /else/ controls how much they send you. There’s absolutely no reason to believe that it’s a good use of your time to triage, filter, and process every email that comes in.
If you spend an hour on email each day (1/8 of your time), and that email doesn’t directly help get at least 1/8 of your job done, then you’re wasting time—even if that time is spent “properly” triaging and handling it.
Yes, an overflowing inbox may be a sign you need to improve your processing capability. Indeed, my experience is that very few people ever examine their own work habits and improve them. But in the case of email overload, it may also simply be that your co-workers send too much email and processing it more efficiently will simply encourage them to send that much more.
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