E-mail Overload: Welcome Back to School

E-mail, arguably the most successful of all computer applications, has grown so rapidly that it' threatens to veer out-of-control for many people. Designed as a simple communications tool, it's now used for dozens of tasks, from personal archiving to community-building and marketing. E-mail is sparking, perhaps even overwhelming, the revolutionary new model of instantaneous communications. This is the first time in human history disparate people in diverse places can communicate with one another instantaneously. But are we ready? We know surprisingly little about the social and psychological impact of e-mail, beyond usage, volume and demographics. We do know few people have workable strategies for coping, a problem that hits college students and tech and office workers especially hard. Your experiences and solutions are, as always, welcome below.

There is a sense of feeling increasingly overwhelmed by the problems e-mail creates (also acute for people not in college, since the vast majority of Americans are still on dial-up systems). Employers get frustrated because workers spend so much time messaging one another with questions, problems and data sent merely because it's so easy. As we move towards an instantaneous model of communicating information, the pressure on everyone to manage information rises. Most people aren't getting much help.

It's simple to send instructions and directions via e-mail, but tougher to hold people accountable for messages delivered in ways they struggle to sort, absorb and file. It's easy enough -- and true enough -- to tell a boss or professor you didn't get the e-mail, don't remember it, or lost it in the crush. For example: "I get a ton of cover-your-ass e-mail from subordinates now," e-mailed Daniel, an account executive in Chicago. "People used to make decisions because I wasn't available, but now, why should they? My employees just e-mail me every little decision so they can't get into trouble and are rattled if I haven't answered them in five minutes. They are learning via e-mail not to think for themselves, not to be in positions where they can be held accountable. They just instantly message me. I'm personally already overwhelmed with e-mail from my superiors and customers, not to mention my wife and kids, and my fishing buddies have me on a dozen mailing lists about fishing I don't really need to be on."

Sandra Berman, a teaching assistant at an Ivy League school, says e-mail is a growing and problematic factor in her relationships with students. "I'm always getting messages minutes before papers are due telling me they won't be done, as if notifying me constitutes agreement. I get very complex questions about reports and papers phrased in questions and e-mails that are 25 words long. If you ask to meet somebody, they are amazed. When I e-mail people -- it's amazing, but kids don't set up appointments face-to-face much anymore -- they often tell me, 'oh, I didn't know about that deadline or schedule change.' And you know what? It happens to me all the time, so it could well be true. I can't really absorb the e-mail I get, and surely can't figure out how to sort and organize it, so something is getting lost."

The overload seems to be hitting offices and colleges particularly hard. The computer savvy have a fighting chance -- to some extent they can retaliate and cope with alternate accounts and IDs, and with filtering and sorting and blocking systems. But most students at most schools don't yet have the time, opportunity or skills. E-mail and IM systems are no longer optional; they're essential to registration, course work, communications and a social life.

Students complain with e-mail so ubiquitous, they spend hours e-mailing and IM-ing people who live two floors below or in the dorm next door. "I IM for a lunch date, to get pizza, to walk to class, to check on my friends and assignments," says Jane, a junior at the University of Chicago. "It sounds lazy, but it isn't, it's just easier." Jim Bagwell, a University of Michigan senior, says his friends become alarmed if he hasn't replied to their instant messages in a few minutes. "They think I'm in trouble, or having tech problems. Sometimes they get pissed off. They e-mail me and call me up to ask if I'm on or have gotten their messages. I'm answering messages as fast as I can, because I know people are waiting. I don't meet with professors anymore because they all are online now, and it's easier for them and me to talk through e-mail. I get so many e-mails they back up if I don't check them every few hours ... I'm becoming something of a slave to it. It's a grind. Over the summer, two friends and I went hiking in Canada. We couldn't believe what was waiting for us when we got back."

Bagwell said in some cases, friends were worried or offended that he hadn't replied in two weeks. He lost the chance to join some college groups because people assumed he wasn't interested, since he had taken so long to reply. "You ought to be able to go on a hike without freaking out everybody you know." There are no universally-shared notions of etiquette regarding e-mail, and, as a result, says Bagwell, he and his friends become somewhat compulsive about checking it. "Definitely, the stress level goes up when I'm not near a computer for a couple of hours. That can be hard on work and peace of mind.The consequences and expectation surrounding e-mail are deeper than people realize," he said. "I'm really think twice before going offline for two weeks again, especially when I get a real job. That makes me a POW."

As people get spammed and flamed, their inboxes clog with messages, partially- read documents, conversational threads and URL's. Important messages can get lost or overlooked -- in fact a growing number of messages are believed to be vanishing in the e-mail overload, ignored, forgotten or overlooked. Even for people with sophisticated sorting and organizing systems, managing an inbox has become increasingly complex. Unlike s-mail, there isn't the certain expectation that messages were sent or received.

"There are many levels on which e-mail affects communications," says Jay, a Stanford graduate assistant studying the social implications of E-mail Overload (he will finish his report next year, and we'll post it). "For one thing, people increasingly expect that people won't read or have the time to respond to e-mail. For another, we tend to rush our messages, since we are always afraid of falling behind. That leads to misunderstandings, misinterpretations, and just poor communicating. People format messages differently, so parts of messages are often missed or not seen at all. Others send multiple messages because they are e-mailing so impulsively they're always correcting or clarifying themselves. That's dangerous in personal relationships and business. There is now a frantic, hurried quality to e-mail communications that is getting worse by the year, as the number of people and businesses online grows."

Like Bagwell, people who use computing in their school, work or personal lives can find themselves inundated with messages if they're offline for even a few hours or days. It's not clear when conversations begin -- or when they should and do end. People who come online for the first time often express surprise at the brusque nature of many e-mail communications, since they don't yet know how cluttered their inboxes will become. E-mail has created a culture of such instant response that messagers expect instantaneous replies. Bosses expect employees to be online regularly, sometimes even in off-hours. E-mail alters the nature and content of communications. Letter-writing -- a nearly dead form of culture all by itself -- requires time to construct messages, while recipients have hours or days to consider their replies. Letter writers often put the same time and energy into writing that gamers or programmers put into their work and entertainment. Ordinary mail also makes advertising and marketing material easy to distinguish from personal communications; junk mail is easy to spot and toss. Now, spam often comes disguised as personal e-mail, with individualistic headings, an approach I consider close to fraud.

E-mail is responsible for the growth of distributed organizations, obviously, and it permits people to communicate easily and cheaply across geographical and time differences. But we know little about how people organize and manage the large amounts of information so many receive.

Look for more on this topic in an upcoming column.

Comments

Out of Office reply

[doctor_oktagon]

This comment, from one of the people quoted in the article:
I'm really think twice before going offline for two weeks again, especially when I get a real job....
is absolutely ludicrous! Use Out of Office reply for gawds sake.

People have to start taking responsibility for their own actions and life ... it's not all a bed of roses. Desk telephones were just as anoying before e-mail became as widespread, and in some ways e-mail is easier to manage because you can ignore the crap. Until you pick up a ringing phone you do not (generally) know what the subject matter is, and if it has a higher priority than your current task.

I do think however, that it would be nice in a mail client to know whether a message was:
Sent directly to you, CC'd, or as part of a mass-mail before actually reading it. Outlook can't do it, so that's me stuffed ;-)

Disclaimer: I know it can be set up using Rules, I just can't be bothered.

Mailing Lists

[David Greene]

As I see it, mailing lists are a big problem. They are trying to do something that is handled much better elsewhere: USENET. It makes much more sense to use something designed for mass distribution and discussion.

Granted, USENET has its share of problems. It's hard to create groups/run a server and the S/N ration can get very low. Perhaps a slightly tweaked version is needed.

Moderation helps but places a large burden on the moderator. Mailing lists (at least the ones I subscribe to) don't seem to have a SPAM problem nearly as large as on USENET. Perhaps because it's easy to set up a mailing list that requires registration to post. Why doesn't USENET have anything like that?

It's a complete waste of resources to have everyone in a domain store separate copies of discussion messages when one USENET archive could be available to all.

What's the trick? Why do most software projects (for example) use mailing lists rather than USENET? How can we take back USENET?

Re:Mailing Lists

[David Greene]

Spam is not the biggest problem on USENET -- it's people that have been there forever and think they deserve the right to rough up the newbies.

That is very true. The same thing happens on certain mailing lists. This has more to do with the people involved than the medium, though the medium does tend to bring out the worst in people. It's easy to dispense with civility when you don't have to address someone face-to-face.

email

[Patrick McRotch]

Email has it's downside as well. Ever seen Demolition Man? Well we're heading in that direction quickly. In the next ten years we're going to become more and more dependant on computers for everyday tasks and simple communication. People are so focused on convenience and instant gratification that we're forgetting the art of conversation, and basic social skills. Mark my word, one day, during our lifetimes, people will spend their entire lives staring at a monitor, only leaving to fulfill their most basic bodily needs such as eating and sleeping. Even today, we have people that do all their work, shopping, and dating on-line. These people are simply not prepared to lead a meaningful life, and use their computer as a way to escape social situations that they never learned to properly cope with.

Don't get me wrong, I enjoy the convenience that email offers, but I think we should limit it's use so that our "digital addiction" does not progress to unhealthy levels. We need to learn how to balance our computer usage with genuine person-to-person communication, lest we become totally dependant on computers.

Also, Katz spelled email wrong. There is no hyphen in email.

Only JonKatz could rant this long about email

[Christianfreak]

I don't really understand what this article is about. Yes people use email, its quite useful. We have some examples of people on University campuses who don't use it wisely ... big deal.

The example of the proffesor who gets emails just before papers are due saying they aren't going to be done: So what? Can this professor not stand up in front of her class and tell her students that practice is not acceptable and will be met with a failing grade?

Blaming email for the above problems is like blaming knives and guns for killing people rather than the people who kill people. Blame this on human laziness/impatience/ignorance/stupidity but not on email. Email is a tool.

As far as people not being ready for instantanious communication... well we've been doing some form of it since smoke signals were invented, or for that matter language. I really don't see what distance has to do with it and I'm not going to give up all form of communication anytime soon.

Re:Only JonKatz could rant this long about email

[crazyeddie]

I agree totally that email is just a tool. Those of us who know what the hell we're doing can cope. The rest are on their own. I use Cyrus IMAP so I can get my mail anywhere, and server-side filtering to divide up my mail into appropriate bins. The important bins get read first. Then come mailing list traffic, system reports and anything else when I have time.

As for the immediacy issue-- I never expected email to be instantaneous-- that's what IM/ICQ are for. If you build up an expectation that a 'store-and-forward' mechanism like email will be instantaneous, then you're deluded and I refuse to feel sorry for you.

If these professors and coporate managers are frustrated at the misuse/misunderstanding of email, have they talked to their students or subordinates and clearly stated what the rules are for email communication? If you don't tell people where the boundaries are, how can you be upset if they exceed them? Tell them that simply sending an email is not sufficient notice for missing a deadline. Tell them that you do not check your mail every 2 minutes and make a more reasonable commitment as to when you will answer. It's new technology, but it's still human-to-human communication, and the etiquette that goes along with that hasn't changed.

Above all, *quit bitching*!! ;^)

not only at schools...

[Lumpy]

in the corperate world it's worse...

3-20 meg Power point prenentations, Mpeg video files, 3-4 meg spreadsheets, and 5-10 meg doc files..... for what? conveying information? noo, the info is only 10% of the file size, the rest is bloat and eye-candy. Your power point presentation doesnt need a WAV of turbo-lover to be effective, your spreadsheet don't need a 3 meg bmp in the background as a watermark to make it work, and your letter didn't need a 3 meg Photo of your head resized to 1X3 inches on your letterhead.

Everyone whines about mp3's and warez are soaking up email bandwidth, it's the lusers and sales people jamming it up with useless drivel disguized as important communication... the file attachment was the #1 worst thing to have ever added to email.

Re:Telephone?

[Lacutis]

I think they were probably more referring to the fact that 50 people in disparate places can all talk to each other simultaneously.

Sure you had "Party Lines" and whatnot but they are fairly localized. This is the first time in human history where You or I can talk to our friends in 15 different countries at exactly the same time like we were sitting in the same room.

Hang on folks, were in for quite the ride in the next 15-20 years.

What the....

[jburroug]

hell? I don't get it, am I the only one here who doesn't have problems managing their email? I maintain two seperate accounts, one at work and one at home. My employer doesn't have my home email address, and the work account never gets used for anything personal, or even checked outside of 8-5 Mon-Fri. On both accounts I use procmail + pine to keep everything sorted and undercontrol. Lists get pre-sorted into their folders by procmail, and most spam gets caught by Postfix via RBL's (at home at least where I run the server, my employer is currently listed as an open-relay on orbz but that's a different story...) and what little spam that does get through is pretty obvisous and get sent to spamcop right quick. With all the filters in place only direct messages to me hit my inbox, and email stays at a managable level, lists get read only when I have the time to spare.

Now I have no such filters on my snailmail so things get all muddled and tend to pile up. I have s huge stack of magazines, mixed with bills (thank $DIETY that I pay everything but rent electronically!), paper spam and the odd once a month actual letter. I get credit card offers disguised as bills or personal letters or checks, I get magazine offers disguised as all sorts of prizes and contests, some require more than a second glance to sort from the legit email. And for some reason my postman refuses to honor the procmial recipe I taped to the inside of my mailbox ;-> I'd love to have a different box for magazines, for bills, for personal mail and a spam filter. Yes I know I can write to the bastards at the direct marketing assoc and get off their mailing lists but that's far more effort than blocking 'net spam is.

For me the S/N ratio is far worse for snailmail than it is for email because I have less control and less options to automate the sorting process. Plus replying costs money, and takes far more effort than hitting ctrl-x in Pine. Now I realize I have it lucky being a geek, I have finer grained control that most "normal" people do, but it doesn't take much effort for even a normal college student type of open up a couple of different free accounts to help sort things, and any of the free POP3 clients allow you to auto-sort mail with almost the same level of control you get with procmail, it just requires you to sit down for an hour or two and do it once, and save yourself hundreds of hours down the road in wasted time.

JonKatz and other stuff

[Lxy]

When I first started reading /., I wondered why whenever JonKatz posted the only things that got modded up were well-written flames against him and not the article.

Well, now I see why. Jon, your article is interesting but you're writing to the wrong crowd. I know how to use e-mail as a tool, the way it was intended. What you're talking about is more suited for the non-geek masses who don't. Take for example that teacher's e-mail issues. Her problem is not so much that students are turning to e-mail but that she's not understanding how to manage it. E-mail doesn't change anything in this instance. Before e-mail I'm sure she got phone calls telling her the same thing.

I personally see e-mail as more managable than phone calls. I can file things away and archive the important stuff for as long as I need it. Today's PIMs are an awesome tool. Think about this: a school district. The students are using Evolution to manage their calendar and e-mail. Imagine the power a teacher has, being able to post assignment dates and so forth on their calendars. No excuses, the PIM doesn't lie. Every student can pull up their assignments for the next few days, no excuses.

In short, e-mail is a tool. Learn to use it.

Re:Telephone?

[univgeek]

I think the key point that Katz missed was

FREE

Rule of the Unexpected

[foqn1bo]

Adams' Rule of the unexpected
(From 'The Dilbert Future')

For every good trend, and unexpected bad trend occurs to neutralize it. For example:

Good Trends:

Computers allow us to work 200 percent faster

Women gain more political influence

Pop Music continues to get better

Unexpected Bad Trends:

Computers generate 300 percent more work

Women are as dumb as men

I get old

Nothing too profound here, but it applies well to this situation. Email, Word Processing, IDEs, Cell Phones, and all sorts of unbridled access to information and communication were invented to help us gain more control, but often times they serve equally to bring more chaos into our lives, either through increased expectations or simply complication. Don't get me wrong, I love new technology as much as any other ./er, but it does irk me sometimes that the new advance in studio recording technology I just bought will make the standard of excellence that much higher. Maybe I might become a member of the pen and pencil club just yet. Ha.

Let's make something round that can travel, again.

[devphil]

Why does every email client feel the need to re-invent the vacation(1) program? Holy fuck, people, it's 8 years old!

The problem with Outlost's Out-of-Office Autoreply is that as far as we can tell, it bypasses all the Rules settings. So even if you have the Rules set up to be a poor imitation of procmail (oh look, another reinvention of the wheel -- why can't Rules do what procmail has done for years?), and your mailing list traffic is redirected to various folders, too bad. The OoO Autoreply takes precedence, and sends replies to lists traffic. Really really annoying.

After about a week of messing with Rules, OoO, and general Outlook stupidity, we moved everything to a Unix box. Procmail is far smarter than anything that can possibly run on Outlook right now, and mutt as a mail client will do all the things you asked for in your post.

End of rant. :-)

And we're surprised...why?

[Uncle Mikey]

When have human beings *ever* been 'ready' for a revolution in the way they do things? Were people 'ready' for the telephone? The radio? The television? The automobile?

Nope. All these things caused upheavals and grumblings when they appeared on the scene. Hell, we're still figuring out what to do with television after 50 years!

The difference is, we're a bit more self-conscious, these days. We study ourselves, not just in the past but in the present and, when possible, future tenses. We fool ourselves into believing that we *can* be in control, and therefore it follows that we *should* be in control.

But we never *have* been in control. Innovations happen to us, and then we figure out what it means afterward.

Mikey,
E-mail Junkie.

composing email can take a long time

[AdamBa]

One thing that I don't think a lot of people realize is how long composing a *good* email can take -- a lot longer than talking on the phone. If you call someone and explain something, they will indicate what parts they understand and what you need to explain more. So it winds up being efficient. Composing a good email is like doing a little presentation, you need to check it over and over to make sure you cover every possible angle. Then you will want to check the spelling, make sure your argument is well stated, and so on, because you only get one chance to get it right (of course, once you get it right, the mail can be forwarded around without the "Telephone" effect, the gradual entropization of ear-to-mouth communication).

The same applies to Slashdot posts also!

- adam

P.S. Wait a minute, that was a Jon Katz article that was topical, insightful, well-argued...what is going on here?!?!?

learn the difference

[PapaZit]

Personally, I have two primary email addresses: one for work, and one for personal stuff.

It amazes me that a lot of office workers don't consider this option. It's like only having a work-provided telephone, or a single mailing address where the letter from your aunt is mixed in with the latest HR newsletter.

When I leave the office on Friday, my work email stays there. There are escalation procedures if they need to contact me in a true emergency, but I don't respond to the minor problems. When I return to work, I check my email 2-3 times a day. If you respond to the inbox bell with pablovian conditioning, you won't get anything done. I read email, decide on the most important thing to do next, then do it. I don't check email until it's done or I'm at a good stopping point. Yes, there are the panicky nitwits who call if I don't respond in 5 minutes. It only takes a few rounds of "Is this really so important that it can't wait an hour?" followed by "I just read the message, and it CAN wait an hour. Click." before they get the point.

I treat personal email the same way. My friends know my phone number, and they know that I might not check or respond to email immediately. It confuses some of them, but they cope. They understand that I have two addresses, and if they send me something at 10:00am, I'm not going to read it until 6:00pm or whenever I'm not at work any more.

You just need to learn to break the cycle. I spend all day on the computer. I used to be a slave to my email. It was burning me out, so I stopped. The transition will piss a few people off, but in the end, you'll be happier and more productive if you don't check your email every few minutes.

Conference call, anyone?

[mosch]

Haven't you ever heard of a conference call?

Re:Conference call, anyone?

[Anonymous Coward]

Or citizen band radio? w00t free!

Re:Conference call, anyone?

[Lacutis]

Even with conference calls, like the person below me mentioned, the cost and S/N ratio of calling 50 people from different countries isn't worth the money involved.

Not to mention the fact that by the time you got around to dialing the 50th phone number, the time involved makes it impractical at best.

Sometimes three-way calls are unbearable, I couldn't imagine even having 5-10 people on the same line and carrying on any kind of coherent conversations.

Re:Telephone?

[outerbody]

i send email when i'd like to get a response soon. i send an IM when i want a response sooner. the most immediate needs are dealt with on the phone.

It's our fault.

[evilninja]

It seems to me that when things get out of control, technologicall illiterate people are easily overwhelmed and often begin to complain - without considering any recourse they could take to eliminate their problems. Chastize your employees for sending meaningless e-mails, and be forgiving if they took the slightly-less-optimal path when faced with a tough decision in a pinch. That could work wonders for halting the thousand "cover-your-ass" e-mails each day from your subordinates.
I work at a fairly large (2,000+ employees on-site) company, and I don't get much unsolicited e-mail from my co-workers. Admittedly, I get more company newsletters that I'd like to, but any "fun mail" that I get is generally by choice. If I take part in the "Did you see that hilarious video about...?" conversations, I get the video in my inbox. I'm not going to offend anyone if I decline their offer to send it to me, either.

I'm also a college student in Computer Engineering, and I feel that I have successfully (and rather easily) avoided "E-Mail Overload." Message filters are a built-in (and vital) component of any decent mail program. Mass school mail goes in a folder that I read if I have time. Mailing list mail goes in a seperate (and usually categorized) folder. You get the point.
Most teachers I've dealt with (yes, outside the engineering school, too) seem to have their communication systems under control as well. Rules are rules, and e-mail doesn't change the rules. None of my classmates or colleagues would assume they have a homework extension because they simply e-mailed the professor the day the homework was due. We know it doesn't work like that.

We may have to be hard-nosed, but it is our individual responsibility to create a standard for our own communications. I quite often reply to my friends' e-mail with my own, but I also respond to e-mail with telephone calls or visits (if it's not too impertinent). Each of my friends has their own standard for cyber-communications as well. I respect the manner in which they choose to deal with my e-mail, and they do the same for me. If your friends freak out because you don't reply within minutes, you're the only one to blame. That's the standard you've set for yourself.