Slashdot Mirror
Putting Emails In Folders Is a Waste of Time, Says IBM Study
An anonymous reader writes "There are two types of office workers in the world — those who file their emails in folders, and those who use search. Well, it looks like the searchers are smarter. A 354-user study by IBM research found that users who just searched their inbox found emails slightly faster than users who had filed them by folder. Add the time spent filing and the searchers easily come out on top. Apparently the filers are using their inbox as a to-do list rather than wanting to categorize information to find it more easily."
Because I'm sure that wouldn't skew the results from people gouging out their eyeballs.
Your inbox gets too unwieldy.
I hate being bipolar; it's awesome!
The right conclusion, is that people suck at organizing emails into folders. Therefore, for most people putting emails in folders is a waste of time.
Well.. maybe. Or Maybe not. But Definitely not sort of.
If you have 100+ mails coming in on a daily basis, and have 6-7 years worth of mail to search through, folders can be useful for cutting down the search time atleast, esp. if you are able to setup rules to route the mails to folders automatically (Even with indexing, sometimes it takes a few seconds to complete the search)
I only autofile stuff into folders when I don't want it coming over on the Blackberry.
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
Did they only evaluate those who manually sort their mail? Having the server put mail into appropriate folders doesn't take any time at all once it is set up.
Most of the mail I need access to was in the last few days. When I have to search in my mail client, I'm lucky if the search results come anywhere near close to what I'm looking for.
So, thanks IBM, but I'll stick with the folder approach until such time as the default search capabilities (in ThunderChicken, LookOut, etc) improve.
What about people who have their emails automatically filed through filters (like Sieve on the IMAP server) and search them when they need to? Their productivity must the through the roof.
Einmal ist Keinmal. What happens but once might as well not have happened at all.
345 users, and still statistically insignificant.
Project folders are superior, especially as time passes one can't remember proper keyword to bring up all relevant emails. Yes, I've used e-mail systems that were folderless and only search was possible, not quite as useful.
And filing is necessary because outlook and run its search for days. When you file your emails, you can search just within that folder, and its much faster. I supposed if you're using outlook 2010 maybe its faster because of its indexing, but its still not very organized.
I use Gmail. I used to use the labels for a while, but I got lazy with it. The search feature gets me what I want 99% of the time (1% is when I can't remember anything about the message I need to find). It's faster too---why click through folders or tags or labels when you can just type?
As a sys admin I file some things like software feature enablers, communications with vendor support and documentation of the sys admin things I do (for the yearly review). But I also search the inbox for things of a more transient nature.
I let my inbox fill up for 3-12 months and massively archive it in one swoop to a small number of folders (about 15). I actually use search quite a bit to help do that sorting faster. What this cleanout process does is force me to delete messages that I'm 99.999% sure I'll never want to see again. They can just clutter up search results and casual browsing.
As messages come in, I use flags to ensure that messages I need to eventually respond to don't get lost in the shuffle. Some frequent, automated stuff gets automatically archived (e.g. amazon purchases), just to help keep the recent inbox low on clutter.
Archiving has advantages and disadvantages. On my personal email account, archived messages are offline; this makes search (or re-indexing) faster but leaves me without those messages when away from my laptop. But more than anything I archive because a single inbox with X years and tens of thousands of messages is pretty cluttered, and I know that eventually I'll want to sort through them to eliminate messages that will never be useful. Fortunately, that's rarely true spam in my case. There's also the odd email I've forgotten about that I have to follow up on, if I forgot to flag it appropriately. What's the cost? Maybe 4 hours a year.
"The universe seems neither benign nor hostile, merely indifferent." --Carl Sagan
Because that's why they'd release such a study.
People are actually using email in two quite distinct ways; but one way is faster at doing what we thought everyone used email for, and is therefor better? Cool.
Frankly, this sounds like a challenge for team search: computers are very good indeed, even with the quite basic desktop search mechanisms, not the fancy search engine stuff, at assorted glorified greps. You want all the emails that mention project X, or were sent by Mr. Y? No problem. You want to know when project X needs to be finished? Well, get all emails mentioning project X and start exploring the exciting universe of different natural language ways of suggesting that project X needs to be finished. Search isn't completely useless; but you've basically gone back to filing...
I've seen a few hints of this in Gmail, which will pick out emails that appear to obviously be appointments or date/time combinations and offer to add them to your calendar; but further expansion would be nice. Aside from the people who are just conceptually crippled, it seems unlikely that users are sorting their emails into folders just because doing electronic shit work is all fun and giggles. They are likely doing it because search can't(or the advanced search features that can, they can't use) organize their email for them in the way they prefer it to be. Let's see a software agent that starts picking out salient topics, and piecing together a slightly creepy knowledge of it by watching your mailstream(and FFS, let's make it client side, or based on servers you control, not some you are a peon in the cloud plantation shit...)
They're not what I'd call "Experts."
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
Ever hear of this amazing technology called a "filter"? It lets you program your email client to do the filing automatically.
Every email client I've used lets you search all your folders at once, so there is no difference in the amount of time it takes to search with either approach to email management.
Did Google pay IBM for this "study"?
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
The supreme irony here is searching an inbox in Outlook 2007 or later is insanely easy, but not so much with Lotus Notes (IBM's database software that people pretend is an email client but is really some sort of memoing system). First of all, the IT department controls whether or not an index even exists, and may enable for some and not for others. And the syntax for searching is pathetic, and when searching, it only takes you to the message, rather than fitlering out all non-hits - and this is with the latest version of Notes.
Notes users are almost forced to use folders to find anything.
.. you use client-side rules to do the majority of the sorting.
Even rule-based sorting/routing into category-based folders is a useful heuristic. If the logic in the rules is reasonably smart, you save even more time.
(And that's not even counting performance impact of storing and indexing a huge number of messages in one folder, or server-side purges that silently delete messages when your provider thinks you don't need them anymore, for those who swear by (and sometimes at) IMAP-client or webmail access.)
Yeah, that's my experience as well. I'm sure you can use the automatic search function faster ... provided you have the exact string to search on.
But thinking back even 2 years to what happening on a minor project and how to search for that? When there have been a dozen other projects using those same terms?
Project folders are the way to go.
I know exactly what I use folders for, and it is not general searching. It is organizing different dialogs and projects so that I can find what the last or last few messages were. Also I have several mailing lists that get sorted into folders automatically on email-save-to-folder. Very convenient.
I suspect the selection of users was 'special' and not in a positive sense.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
Folders aren't a search mechanism, they're an organization and triage mechanism.
Then again, this is research from the people behind Lotus Notes...
Its easier to do CTRL+A, delete when they are all in the one folder. If it was important the person will send another email.
Funny thing is that I don't manually file any of my emails. That's what filters are for.
Use tagging *and* search. Run a global search, and scan the results for the tags you think you most likely applied to the email you are searching for. It doesn't have to be a dichotomy.
Clearly nobody in the 354 person study uses Outlook. Worst. Search. Ever. I could see it in gmail maybe, but never in Outlook. I'd go crazy if I had to keep my work emails in the Inbox, or in one folder. In Outlook, organizing my email(filters or by hand) keeps me sane.
So, I am one of the stupid filers, at my workplace. But to help defend myself, I think the searching capabilities is most email clients is horrendous. If I had a gmail account for all my work related email, then that may be a different story, but unfortunately, I have to stick to the couple of email clients that I am allowed to use at work, and they can't search worth a damn. I am able to quickly find emails, without searching, as most people lag behind, and try to get the search in the email client to work properly.
YOU'RE WINNER !
Another lame blog
Our company deployed Enterprise Vault to archive our mails, and now it doesn't matter if I file or not, because every search takes 10x as long.
Oh, and it doesn't archive embedded images. So all those screenshots users sent me are now missing. Thanks, IT brains!
I frequently had a habit of reading emails on my smartphone and forgetting about them. Now, I can either move them to Reference on my phone, or do it when I get back to my desk. But nothing slips through the cracks this way, which was a huge problem when I first got a smartphone.
And please stop referring to Lotus Notes as 'enterprise ready' software. It should never be deployed to any organisation, regardless of size.
To answer the question, if you use Lotus Notes.. you HAVE to have folders. The search is so horrible that if you don't.. then you won't find anything.
Example: You are looking at 'all documents' folder in Lotus Notes, or the Inbox, and you see 5 emails with key words in them and you think "I'd like to see all emails with those key words". So, you open search and type the words in. Does it return the emails currently on the screen? Maybe. Does it return more emails? Maybe. Can it return different search returns on different days? Yes.
Have pity on us who are forced to use Lotus Notes.
Further... I have rules which automatically move emails into specific folders when they arrive in the inbox. It is probably the only useful automation Lotus Notes provides.
To elaborate, the big huhar about Notes is that you can code agents and extensions yourself.. and make your email client / suite do.. anything! anything! at! all! so long as you can grasp Basic syntax, like bashing your head against the wall, can handle running the same agent twice and getting different results and have a zen like attitude towards resolving software bugs while wearing a blindfold.
The problem is that many organisations prevent users from writing and using agents, or making use of any customisation features in Notes. This is partially because it makes it so easy to run rings around corporate stupidity and makes it easy to DDOS Notes servers accidentally. Yes, accidentally. *sigh*
So, back to Notes we go. Don't complain about Outlook. When will Notes die?
And yes, the latest Notes 8, rewritten in Java, is a great improvement.. but is just as annoying as the old Notes 7.
You have a sick, twisted mind. Please subscribe me to your newsletter.
The only reason I keep some email in folders is so that I can delete bunches of them when I am done with a task.
For example, once I am done with a project, and I never have to think about it again, the whole thing gets vaporized.
It is quite satisfactory.
Yes, if you use gmail because search actually works.
No, if you use Outlook because their search is a dog.
I'll see your hokum and raise you a boondoggle.
"Apparently the filers are using their inbox as a to-do list rather than wanting to categorize information to find it more easily."
So where does the writing of to-do lists get measured in the study?
And, how about those of us who both file, and use search in those situations where we know it'll be faster?
Old news.
Google told us to use search for emails since day 1 of GMail.
I work for an IT consulting firm. Within the last week I've received over 2000 emails; this is normal. A lot of these messages will be service ticket notifications, which are very useful to keep and access via Exchange for Android when I'm at a client. The rest of these will be important notifications about server health and other important monitoring information. With 52 weeks per year, that's over 100,000 emails in my inbox, which is a phenomenal amount to index. Sorting my email into folders helps to keep my inbox manageable. I'll point out that I don't use my inbox as a to-do list either.
In any case, modern versions of Outlook can easily search in all folders at once, and have the ability to sort email automatically based on patterns. Logically we can assume that a smaller inbox is faster to search through for more relevant information, hence in a real-world test the filers would be more efficient. Being able to see the my recent important messages also helps to keep me focused should I be doing 40 jobs at a time.
This may not apply to everyone, but those who have enough email that they actually need to sort it will probably have a similar experience. Searching may help to free up a few extra seconds here and there, but a clutter will always create a bottleneck. Quickly glancing at my screen once every 30 minutes to see if I have anything new and noteworthy is far more efficient than compulsively checking every 5 minutes and marking all of those misc notifications as read.
Searching is Google. Folders is Yahoo. Google is the biggest Internet success, now that the Internet is vast and complex. Yahoo can't find a buyer, 15 years after it launched the Internet Bubble with its IPO.
If your email is as full as the 1995 Internet, you might like folders better. If your email is as full as the 2011 Internet, you'll like searching.
--
make install -not war
Any email that has to deal with my job go to my inbox. Emails from internal DL's that aren't related to the position I'm hired to, go to folders. But if it's an email that's related to my position, my team, etc. all go to my inbox. Any status emails that happen more than once a day go to their own folder as well. I have search folders setup to quickly find items that I do search for. I find this solution to be the best in keeping me in touch with the things I work on. Hundred's of emails a day and it's not overwhelming.
With Gmail, I just throw all old email into an 'old' folder and use search since gmail's search is great.
With Thunderbird I separate into separate folders since T-bird's search is... okay. It works like you'd expect. Quick look in the folder, then search all.
With Outlook (at work) I separate things by folders since Outlook's search is abysmally bad. Advanced search never works properly.
In other news, Google is taking over the world with searching, while Yahoo's original hierarchical directory is so tired it can't find a buyer, 15 years after its IPO launched the Internet Bubble.
What I need is an AI thesaurus map that can organize my emails into categories to show me topics I've discussed within some category selected by timeframe, correspondents, or keywords.
--
make install -not war
Actually, I do both. I file stuff that I want to separate in folders according to a broad category system, but then I just use the 'search' functions to find anything. I don't bother hunting through the folders. That *would* be a waste of time.
The best use of folders is to direct some emails into their own lists before reading them. So they don't clutter up the main Inbox. Automated alerts each in their own folder as they come in are easier to deal with. Especially if I want to delete a whole series of them, and especially if there's a lot of them which would overwhelm the rest of my inbox. Or just a few, which would get lost in my inbox.
These folders are better implemented as views, rather than actually separate storage. In fact my entire email data store would be best implemented as a database app. Indexing my messages, relating them by correspondents, subjects and keywords, would make them much more productive as a knowledge base. And easier to compose into finished documentation, and find trends and stats, and manage tasks...
--
make install -not war
Where I work has absurdly low quotas on the Exchange server, I believe 100 MB. The only thing I keep in my Inbox is the "to-do" kind of stuff, everything else goes into a folder in a pst file on my local drive. It sucks because I end up having to search two places a lot of time because you cannot search both an Exchange and local pst with one search.
First, I'll throw out the environment I'm using. Windows 7 Enterprise, Outlook 2010. I've been using Outlook for over two years after we upgraded from Lotus Notes (anything is an upgrade from Lotus Notes) and have not deleted more than a handful of emails since the upgrade. I receive on average about 150 emails a day. I keep the current month's email in my inbox and archive every prior month into a folder - by month.
This doesn't exactly organize my email - I just end up with 12 folders a year full of around 2000-2500 emails in each depending on the month. How do I make sense of it all? Search. Outlook is set to index all mail in my archives (currently around 9gb total), and I can sometimes narrow down by timeframe based on my folders. So far this scenario works great for me, I'll give an example of how.
Client ABC Inc calls customer service to complain that their file specifications are incorrect - they're missing a "B" record and cannot process the file! We need to fix this immediately because their CEO plays golf with our CEO or something. I was assigned the project that built their "file" and looked through our project folder. At some point on a client call two years ago the customer told us to remove the B record during testing. The test file we sent them never included this record, and when the project went live it of course did not include the B record.
Between the archived test files in our project tracking system and the emails I recovered from 2009 regarding the project we were able to convince the client that they were nuts - they never received a B record because they told us two years ago they did not want one. We then suggested they could add a new B record, but of course - that would cost them. =)
everyday is another shooter.
If I were to just keep all of my messages (both sent and received) in the same folder/file/directory (or folders/files/directories) forever, many of them would eventually become too large and inconvenient to work with. So, I wrote a script to file all my old ones away once a year on January the 1st into a directory for the previous year and replace them with new empty ones. Also, this does not stop me from searching (e.g. using grep) through my entire archive to find what I want.
The study focused on aspect of folders; searching. Here are a number of other reasons to use folders.
1. Categorizing: I have several different folders for activities that do not need immediate attention; SCA, chainmaille, clubs, etc. When I have time I will read those emails.
2. Priority: There are some emails that I want to respond to immediately. The best way to highlight these is to sort them into a folder.
3. Separate Projects; When I am working on several projects at a time it is great to be able to look at only the emails related to that project. It also highlights when I get replies about a specific project. It also helps with task switching. When I can look at emails that deal only with the project I am working on at that specific time I am less distracted by other emails.
4. Archive/deletion: I have several folders where I will read the emails and then occasionally clear the folder. It is much faster than deleting each individual email. I can also export all the emails from a project and save them in case I need them later.
So no, searching is not the only reason to use folders.
In my work place I'm a member of about 300 different mail groups. I have filters set up to dump mail into specific folders. I have a bunch of folders I just plain ignore.
I don't do either. I use sorting. Often I can remember a crucial piece of information... the sender.
It still kills me that gmail doesn't have the way to say show me all email from user X in the order they where sent. I read my gmail alongside my work email in outlook.
I often find emails where others fail with this simple strategy. Searching requires you to know the word(s) that are in the email or subject. It is usually something completely different than what your brain remembers. Searching works well on the web because the web pages have tons of content that might match what your trying to hit...or many sources of the same information. Email is more precise....searching for Geese won't return Goose.
Combine this with search you might get a general date that the "subject" was being discussed in your company. Then sort by date and start scrolling. If you delete stupid emails or catalog them away you get even better.
At the end of the day email is a horrible way to store data. Use a wiki or something. If you are searching your email it is usually an indication that the information is not stored somewhere better.
Because if it was Lotus Notes -- IBM's fave -- I can understand why the folks that kept everything in their Inbox were able to find stuff faster. Lotus Notes' search function sucks like a tornado then you ask it to so anything even mildly complex. (And to me searching through a tree of folders shouldn't actually be complex.)
CUR ALLOC 20195.....5804M
It's not rocket science. If one method doesn't work, you try the other.
From IBM's Oct. 2005 Best practices for large Lotus Notes mail files: "...you should advise your users to file documents from their Inbox to other folders, to keep it as small as possible..."
1000s of cron jobs, code delivers, build and test results all belong in your Inbox? Bullshit.
I have specific work related folders set so that the filters I've created sort my mail for me. This is includes critical mail from my bosses and critical mail generated by the servers I support. These help me become more proactive than reactive. You don't want to get a call from your boss asking what's wrong with server A, and this is the first you've heard of it.
gmail search actually works so i dont use folders. lotus notes is a giant piece of monkey balls so i have to use folders because the search is crappier then said monkey balls.
Bluemail is the email client used for this study. It is a web based
client that includes both traditional email
management features such as folders, and modern attributes
such as efficient search, tagging, and threads. This
combination of features allowed us to directly compare the
benefits of preparatory retrieval behaviors that rely on
folders/tags, with opportunistic search and threading. We
could not have made this direct comparison if we had used
a client such as Gmail that does not directly support folders
separately from tags. Also, Bluemail could be used to
access existing Lotus Notes emails, making the transition to
Bluemail very straightforward. For a full description of the
design see [17].
So....rather than using traditional email clients already in use...the "study" made them use something that was unfamiliar to them or anyone else. Oh wait, its an IBM study...and an IBM email client....and IBM fluff piece. Nothing to see here, move along...
I do not sort emails because I like to do it, though like another poster mentioned, most is done with rules in outlook. I do it because I work on normally between 20-30 projects at a time. Other people are also involved in my project and need to see the history. How shall they know what is what, when there are 6000 emails in one network folder.
Plus, dont you need to know what you are searching for? Sometimes you just need to read an email trail before you know what to search for.
In Outlook, you can't search more than one folder at a time. I wonder if that was taken into account, be it as a CON for searchers or simply a requirement that had to be met in order for the search to turn out 'faster' as a PRO for searchers.
The study should check which of the two users have left more things undone. By filing into folders you get a to-do list, and you can clearly see what you need to do. By having all mails in one folder things can get messy, and important mails can be forgotten and thus, never gets that important reply.
I must be getting very old.
The study does posit that most people sort as part of task management, rather than to increase search efficiency. When I receive a new message I review it. If it doesn't require action on my part, then I file it in the appropriate folder (ie projects, etc.). If it does require action, then it stays in my inbox until the task is completed, then it gets filed.
If I just left everything in my inbox, then I would be a less efficient worker as I would never be able to keep all of my pending tasks straight. So, while filing email into folders may not increase search efficiency, it does improve my overall productivity, which is more important to both the company and my career.
Context fail,
I can see this being valid for a work environment, but at home, when i am thinking in terms of electronic design, the ecosystem design stuff is just in the way, and vis versa.
Where as, filtering it into folders gets some of the irrelevant stuff out the way, without me expending effort on it
I'm not really interested in search, and how fast it is. I hardly use it.
I have a simple workflow. I use my inbox (or actually several inboxes) as a todo-list. Everything that's in there has an item I have to look at.
When I'm done with the mail, I delete it or pu it in a folder. That way my inbox is clear to look at, and I hardly ever forget to do something, or forget to reply to an email.
When I want to search for something (which hardly ever happens) I mostly know what I'm looking for, and can browse through the folder myself.
So for me it's not about wasted time in sorting, and hardly any time won in searching. It's about workflow.
Well, don't worry about that. We can get you back before you leave. (Dr. Who)
At any given time I have about 20 different tasks of varying timelines that need to get done. Lots of emails regarding those separate things, all relevant, will come in. I have a folder titled FORAC (for action, we love our acronyms in the military) and subfolders for specific tasks, each containing all the relevant emails. When I need something, I just hit up that folder. When the task is done, I move that subfolder to FORAC Complete so I can still reference it, but it's not in my FORAC folder. This tremendously helps me keep track of rapidly changing requirements and updates.
Most people don't file mail into folders to make it easier to find. They do this to NOT READ the email that they know doesn't matter (which in a typical corporate environment is close to 90%). In Outlook, users can even set archival and deletion periods for such mail and get rid of it automatically. That's what I used to do when I had Outlook.
How will my cow orkers read the 50 000 messages I have filed by client if I leave them in my inbox?
Watch this Heartland Institute video
Which was higher, speed or accuracy? I'd rather add a few seconds to be sure an email really doesn't exist.
For in politics, as in religion, it is equally absurd to aim at making proselytes by fire and sword. - Publius
...you can keep emails? Seriously. I deal and delete. If it's *really* important or interesting, I might save as a file in a file-system folder. At work, I certainly don't trust keeping things in Outlook.
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
Search works great when you know exactly what you are looking for. Unfortunately there have been more than a few times when I had to go browsing for emails related to a feature that I didn't know the exact name of. There have also been times where I would have to use search terms that would cast far too broad a net. I don't see myself ever going away from a folder hierarchy.
No, that's not the only reason. Putting emails in folder, using rules that move them to those folders automatically based on content or context, is also useful for prioritizing (or deciding) what to read. Of the 600 emails I receive each day, only about 200 stay in my inbox, the rest goes to folders. Lots of those folders contain stuff I might need under certain circumstances, but that I don't need to read immediately.
It saves me a HUGE amount of time to have two thirds of my email sent directly to folders that take them out of my priority list. It saves more time even than search.
I share an e-mail account with colleagues. The sorting isn't just for convenience, there's information stored in the organizational structure itself.
As a single user, having read every e-mail, you search only for that which you've already seen. That's quick, no doubt. But imagine searching for something that may not be there.
How long would it take you to search through someone else's e-mail to answer a simple question? For example, find all of the e-mails discussing a particular project.
Sure you could search. You could serach for the name of the project, the members of the project, the dates of the project. But unless you read each and every single e-mail, you'll never know for sure that you've nto missed one e-mail discussing some minor aspect of the project.
But, since each and every e-mail is, necessarily, read -- by the recipient -- it can easily be thrown into the given project's folder. Makes it really easy for someone else to catch-up on the project at any given time. Also easy for me to tell you where to find information on the project.
That whole concept goes for backups as well. It's easy to drag a folder and have a backup of an important, and maybe completed project. Very difficult to do it with searches -- probably impossible.
There is information present in structure itself, which is not contained within the data itself, and yet is not meta information of either. The more you can encode into that structure, the more that structure will work for you directly. It adds all sorts of new capabilities, which would otherwise be incredibly arduous to obtain.
Those of us who want to *read* our email when it comes in, not just search for it later?
For example, say various chicks are constantly emailing you. So you create a "chicks" folder. Then on Friday night you want to get laid. Are you going to remember the chick's name that sent you BIE (boobies in email) two weeks ago? Of course not. That's why you separate emails into folders.
The premise of TFA is completely implausible.
How many more years will slashdot have an off-by-one error on your Score in your profile?
The inbox file just keeps getting bigger and bigger and bigger. Or on more modern email systems, that directory just keeps growing. Either way, users with huge unread mailboxes in /var/mail give me gas. And if they delete one, you have to restore to the last backup which was last night and they loose everything else. Not a good situation. File your friggen emails. They go into your network storage which is backed up regularly (hopefully).
... putting emails in folders means you restrict the search to just emails in those folders, if you get a lot of email folders definitely make sense. Especially if you are on a mailing list.
"The ability to run custom searches are common among all email clients, but search king Google has expanded the practice with two concepts; labels and conversation threads." ... "Microsoft Outlook, Apple Mail and other programs have since adopted conversation threading for email."
*sigh*
Dunno about you guys, but I've used threading messaging systems since the early 90s. Heck, the emails have the References header precisely for that purpose. I blame Outlook for the Dark Age of the 2000s.
(And Apple Mail's threading sucks. It just looks at the subject, so if it's a more common subject like "Lunch tomorrow?", you get all kinds of people in it.)
I don't just file for myself, I file in case I get hit by a bus.
To expect my work colleagues to work out what search terms to use is unreasonable. But if everything is filed by topic and by date, they'll be easily able to jump in and find relevant info and come up to speed quickly.
Are those all Lotus Notes users? If so, the result doesn't come as much of a surprise ... ;) Notes must be one of the worst email clients on this earth ...
Folders and search are for different use cases.
I tend to use folders for emails that I need to keep but know I'm unlikely to need to refer to any time soon. It gets them out of the way, and in fact makes searching on my main inbox folder easier, because it removes the unwanted archive stuff from the search results.
The trick with folders is not to over-think your folder structure. I know people who meticulously arrange everything into folders based on the sender. That does indeed make searching harder. But a sensible use of folders can definitely make things easier.
I work at a large software company too, but I decided that my work life is not so miserable yet that I need to check my smartphone every time an email comes into my inbox. So I don't sync my mail to the phone. Mail is done at comfortable times, normally on my desktop (or in meetings — perfect opportunities for keeping up!), or at least with a big screen and a big keyboard. If they want me urgently, my phone number is in the directory.
My exception safety is -fno-exceptions.
Everyone has their workflow... leave them the fuck alone and let them do their work. They will be less productive if you try to force your way upon them.
I don't have the habit of deleting mail. At work, I discovered that the file size of a .pst file in Outlook cannot exceed 2GB, or else, Outlook freezes.
I therefore have the habit of creating separate postboxes for different aspects of my work. If it's dealing with, say, the NOR flash product line, I have a postbox called NOR flash, and within it, different folders. Same goes for other job functions I have to deal with, such as Inventory Management, Sales Bulletins, Forecasts and so on.
As a result of this approach, I never had this problem again. I miss folders in GMail.
It's really like the web: catalogs like Yahoo couldn't keep up with search engines, so why should you categorize your mails when there are search engines for them? Works well with mutt!
Computer simulation made easy -- LibGeoDecomp
i am the type that leaves everything in the Inbox and search for what i need - but when i was issued a company laptop with Office 2007 installed; Outlook just sucked at searching the Inbox. upgrading to a Mac OSX laptop with Office 2011, everything just got a lot better - meaning searching the "Inbox" is now feasible again :) i think it really depends on the mail client that is used (or, forced onto you - in a corporate environment).. i've always found searching the Inbox in gmail to be very efficient. in some cases tho; breaking your "massive" inbox into smaller project inboxes, categorizing them at least one level makes sense - you just need to remember your logical separation before diving into a search; worst case, you can search recursively as well.
In addition to postboxes and folders, I too use rules, but I believe there is only a certain #rules Outlook lets you create. It helps me not necessarily take off my priority list, but rather deal with them together. But my favorite thing about Outlook is the ability to recall messages that I later discovered either had a major error, or was sent to the wrong recipient - something that other mail services don't have. I'd be interested to know whether any mail service other than Exchange has it.
Merlin Mann's been saying this for years. Nice to see the concept getting te attention it deserves :-)
It's based on a pretty rigid folder sorting scheme, with a folder called "Reference".
Reference is a folder that contains e-mails that I need to refer to often, and quickly - I usually have less than 20 e-mails in there, so search is completely pointless.
However, my structure is such that it makes focusing searches easier, or I can search everything just like the all-in-the-inbox types do.
Another benefit of my structure... I can set specific folders (like Reference) to not AutoArchive (I use Outlook), so that I don't have to go looking in PSTs for certain e-mails.
In most email clients you can redirect emails from certain addresses to a folder. And it's quicker to just click on that folder instead of having to type in the address in the search bar.
I use procmail. Virtually no time wasted. This won't give me a gazillion mails in my inbox that one or the other MUA can't handle.
- Searching is nothing else than showing mails by a temporary tag.
- Putting mails in a special folder is nothing else then tagging the mails with the folder name for later view.
=> So there must be some overhead to folders, as you do something in advance. And there must be a solution to eventually make use of that.
cb
Imagine using search to try to find parts you ordered from newegg! Their e-mails use some kind of code for parts. Good luck searching those.
The problem with folders is the usual problem afflicting all database structures. I'm an account manager and I have 140 clients plus industry contacts plus internal departments involved in this and that.
If I have an email from Client A which has input from 3 internal departments and 2 external suppliers, and is also relevant to Client B, where do I file this?
Besides, Outlook won't even let me create 140 folders.
My solution: Inbox, 2011 folder, 2011-sent-mail folder, 2010 folder... etc etc
Which is a disaster, but a disaster that sells to corporations...
I have many places email comes from, so I automatically route it to individual folders. Management communication, vendors, salesmen, and newsletters are the biggest ones. There's no way I'd get confused what folder to look in, and it cuts down search times just by being more specific.
CC.
TaijiQuan (Huang, 5 loosenings)
My exchange inbox has size restrictions. Archive folders on the SAN don't..
At least in my situation, it would NOT be easier to search for things if it was all in one big blob.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
A lot of people don't use folders for finding things, but rather because their e-mail server or .pst files have limits in size. I often have to help people create additional folders just because Outlook or Exchange hit the ceiling for folder size and we had to divide their e-mails into separate folders. Plus, as others have pointed out, searching one folder is faster than searching every folder. The study suggests to me that people just aren't fluent in using their e-mail applications.
I don't use folders - what a pointless waste of time except to archive out so your inbox is empty once a year. I tag (actually, it's "label" in Opera but the same thing).
Opera is my main web and email client and all my email comes into my F4-left pane and gets tagged appropriately. You can have it learn from tagged emails, or provide strict rules. When you only want to see, e.g. emails from your online backup provider, you just click the relevant tag. You can also choose to have those show up in a general "unread mail" folder or not - whether or not they are read (i.e. you don't necessarily want to "read" every automated email and don't want to have to "read" them all to stop them hiding an important unread email).
If you only want to see incoming faxes from your fax-to-email system, you just click the relevant tag (I set it up by subject line but it takes seconds to create a tag for anything). If the fax was relevant to a particular project, you can tag it with that (or have it done automatically if your emails have enough content) and then it's under BOTH "fax" and that project name.
Searching? Start typing in the search boxes and it insta-narrows across either the email account you have selected or all accounts for the user (and it's a full text search, so you can just type anybody's name or even a word that you remember being in the email).
It also does the same for all my RSS feeds, too.
Remember what WinFS was promised to be? I pretty much have that for my email at the moment. I always wonder why people struggle along with clunky mail systems that only integrate into their browser by mailto: links. Hell, it even auto-saves any draft I ever make as soon as I start typing it. My mailboxes have followed me for YEARS now through so many versions of Opera. The oldest emails I have saved are from 2002 - and all insta-searchable without even telling how old or new they are.
Does this include setting up mail rules to automatically sort mail into folders? Of course this is in combination with having a mail client that can search through all folders.
Obviously the "smarter" group wasn't encumbered with Lotus Notes. What a POS.
Searching on my exchange server takes days, I don't know what's wrong but it's awful. I organize into a few generic folders (vendors, projects, etc) then at least when I search those folders it takes hours instead of days. So a combination of sorting AND searching.
I'm one of the inbetweeners....I have gmail set to auto label/file incoming emails according to filters. Then I just archive them when I'm finished. To find them again, I use search. I just don't want my inbox to be 1000's long, so I have to put them somewhere. So I make my program file them, I just one-click archive (Will amazon sue me?), and also search. I guess that makes me an inbetweener.
It depends on folder structure. I generally go for something relatively simple at work:
INBOX
Sent
Received
2011
. Q1
. . Received
. . Sent
. Q2
. . Received
. . Sent
Anything for the current (calendar) quarter in Sent/Received, and then every quarter it gets moved into Q1/2/3/4. If I ever get a message saying that I'm hitting my mailbox quota I move the oldest quarter (probably from 2010) to a local file. If I need to find something it's generally a matter of trying to remember roughly when it occurred, and then using basic search functionality to kind a keyword to narrow down the messages.
More organized that one giant folder, but easier to do / less hassle then a gajillion different folders.
For any filing rule predicate there exists a search predicate you can run later.
It's a way to work around slow or overloaded search engines. If you run and cache common search predicates when the mail is received, which is ideally spread out throughout the day, searches will complete faster. Filing rules are an index for commonly used search predicates.
If you have 15 folders of different things, that could take time. I have work, school, and web purchases. Everything else stays in the Inbox until trashed.
Vote monkeys into Congress. They are cheaper and more trustworthy.
I don't file my email into folders, I have a computer to do that. They are good at that kind of thing you know... popfile.
So now my search is faster than yours because I can target a foldered subset of my emails without the overhead of moving emails to the right folder. Looks like I win.
This signature intentionally left blank
I have to use Outlook for work on my Thinkpad. I use Gmail for all personal use (web or phone interface). Why can you have thousands of emails in Gmail with near instant search and no bogging down, but if you tried to do that with Outlook it would take forever. Plus it constantly wants to "archive" your email in a way that means you'll likely never see it again and can't handle thousands of emails in the inbox like Gmail can. Search takes forever and is not intuitive, autofilters are not very good. Outlook is way behind Gmail.
Based on the dealings I have had with IBM over there years (several companies, different projects), IBM needs to spend their time figuring out how to make their own products work rather than trying to figure out user behavioral patterns. The fact that I've never seen a single IBM project completed at an employer of mine in the 20 years I've been in IT tells me that instead of searching their email, folks might actually need to use it as a "To-Do" instead. http://43folders.com/ http://inbozero.com/
#!/Jerald
Project folders are superior, especially as time passes one can't remember proper keyword to bring up all relevant emails.
Yeah, the study isn't studying your use case. Here's one of mine - I have a folder called 'Expenses'.
When I get an e-mail receipt or invoice, it goes into the Expenses folder. When it's time for accounting, I go to that folder, step down the list, and put the data into the accounting system. Mind-numbingly boring but effective (hey, where are my microformats?). If I had to search for each of these, it'd take forever - many of them are one-off expenses.
I use the Nostalgy extension for Thunderbird, so filing the message takes three keystrokes ('S' 'e' 'enter') and perhaps 3 seconds (IMAP). Nostalgy saves me enough time on a regular basis that I donate to the project whenever it comes to mind.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
I use Outlook 2010 for work and use 'Categories' for sorting information. I have about 200 metadata tags and usually tag an email with 2-4 of them while working through my email in date ordered view. I've put the categorize button on the titlebar which automatically gets it an auto-assigned hotkey (Alt-2) in my case which means I can assign all categories for a given email as I read it in less than 5 seconds. It also means emails can exist in more than one category unlike with folders where you have to remember where you put them, unless you have a really good filing system. When I need to find something, I switch to collapsed category view (macro on toolbar) and expand the relevant category, easy to find things. I've got about 25 Gig of historical email archived into quarters and it seems to work fine. I also use a similar thing with personal email on Gmail with tags (i.e. 'Accounts' for websites I sign up for and 'orders' for things like amazon purchases). Data is only useful if you can turn it into information. My method isn't perfect, but is the best I've found for how 'I' work.
The research contradicts what my semi Aspergers mind tells me to do, so it must be wrong.
I have 12,079 messages in my main GMail inbox. All my email inboxes combined contain 26,369 messages. This only goes back to November 2005 as I have never gotten around to importing my emails dating back to the early '90s.
I don't find this number of messages unwieldy at all. I've set up a few (7) smart mailboxes for different clients, but I use Apple Mail's search feature to take care of the rest of my needs.
www.clarke.ca
I want a system that lets me check a box to make an email a task, showing a new line to put all the task data in, like enter in a due date that adds it to my daily calender/todo list, priority, typeable tags, and then when I check the done box it gets auto archived.
The todo list should hopefully give me some nice sorting options, like by tag, by date, by priority.
Make it in a system that companies will not reject (Opensource? Is that safe? Who supports it?), and then wait for a big company to come along and buy it from you...before they ruin it within 2 years.
I was working on a helpdesk team, and we had a user with her outlook pst file getting full...
she wasn't on desk so we just did the most natural thing: delete recycle bin, problem solved. right?
apparently her brilliant organizational system revolved around: shit i need - press delete - like gmail's archive only with the delete key.
well, good for you - next time - either learn to clean your own shit or make a system that makes sense to others who try to help.
While I buy the "search is faster" argument for the giant inboxes we all have, folders still serve a purpose. There are old conversations that I want to keep ... that when I get around to needing them I may not remember the right keyword.
Perhaps I have a thread from Customer1 that turns out to be highly relevant to ProductA even though it doesn't mention that product anywhere in the email. I want it in a folder.
Labels can be considered folders in this case.
Point being is that JUST searching is not adequate, either, once you are moving to long-term archival instead of on-going conversation. Very few things make it to my folders ... but those things that do belong there.
It is more productive to voice thoughtful opinions (reply) than to judge (moderate) others.
Did IBM conduct this study internally or in heterogeneous environments? Probably the former. I have 20 years of mail server administration experience (Sendmail, Postfix) that says otherwise. I've spent hours helping people with oversized inboxes who have either lost emails or there mail is bouncing because their mail spool is over 1 Gigabyte and their inbox file can't be appended. More hours spent addressing client-side or server-side performance problems because people don't care if they chew up 3 gigabytes of RAM on the server because they have a 1.2 GB inbox. The fools who publish this nonsense obviously didn't measure how quickly a user with a 50 megabyte inbox can check their new mail with POP or IMAP in comparison with the user with an 800 megabyte inbox. If you add up those seconds lost across users each time mail is checked one would find a different "answer" than the study creators decided they wanted. Email server performance problems in environments devoid of quotas demonstrate a willingness of users to exploit resources to the point of slowing down mail collection for everyone. Email server performance and thus MUA (Mail User Agent) performance is improved the smaller people keep their inbox (quotas or no quotas). A Macintosh OS X user using Spotlight can find email just as quickly regardless of what folder it's in. A UNIX user with a shell script can search hundreds of folders to identify a sough-after piece of email within minutes. I've been filing email with Pine since 1990, have used most email programs out there (Outlook, Outlook Express, Mozilla Thunderbird, mail.app, Pine, Elm, etc.) and it's typically the people who *don't* file their email who come to me for help with problems, not those that do use folders. I find studies that encourage laziness and suggest users should consolidate email in their inbox to the point of negatively impacting server performance and the speed at which others can check their email to be unscientific if not profane. It's obvious this study was crafted with a very narrow set of parameters that ensured this specious outcome and should be ignored due to its lack of rigor as to what variables are actually involved in the time values impacting people checking and using email on both the client/server sides.
Hmm. I use Gmail, and even though the search on Gmail is pretty good, I still file my emails. Why? Because I use my Inbox very much like an in-tray - I leave emails in it that are yet to be dealt with, and anything that is not immediately important I file away. This leaves my inbox less cluttered, and makes it very clear what still needs replying to or otherwise dealing with, without me having to write it in a to-do list. It also looks aesthetically pleasing and makes me feel overall less stressed about my emails when I can see how many need dealing with all at once, but I guess that's more personal preference. Not to mention the other points raised such as usability for shared accounts. Ultimately, though, I think everyone has their preferred way of dealing with emails, and if you're after efficiency your best bet is just to let them get on with it.
Apparently the filers are using their inbox as a to-do list rather than wanting to categorize information to find it more easily.
That isn't what the article says. Actually, that is the converse of what it says. It says that those who use their inbox as a todo list become filers. Not that those who are filers use thier inbox as a todo list. Further, the article suggest that people should categorize information to find it more easily. It says that doesn't work.
The article says that those who use their inbox as a todo list often turn to filing things in folders when they get too much email to fit on the screen. The research says that this doesn't help - they spend too much time putting things into folders. Instead, it recommends keeping a threaded view to minimize screen real estate.
Many people use the inbox as a ‘todo’ list, a function which is compromised by a high incoming message volume, causing them to folder.
Using your inbox as a todo list is a valid strategy only if you keep up with your email as it arrives. If you can't do that, then you need a separate todo list. But it should be a single folder - or a separate app. I use my inbox as a todo list, but the only 2 folders are inbox (todo) and trash (done).
I'm a fan of combining search, rules to drop email in folders and smart mailboxes. These things aren't mutually exclusive, you know.
...if I have more than 1000 or so messages in a folder. It just searches...and searches...and searches...never showing any hits. Searching my inbox? Impossible. the only way I can search is to use folders, and then hope I'm searching the right folder...which kind of negates the whole point of searching.
Never let a lack of data get in the way of a good rant.
I hardly ever put emails in special folders. In fact, I put all my sent and received emails into a common PST root level and use a desktop search tool to find whatever I need. Sometimes the search is extremely reliable while other times it requires a bit of forensics on my part to systematically track down my intended prey. Many emails diverge from the original topic or contain multiple critical action items so classifying them in unique folders isn't a very effective means to recall later as some might think. My desktop search usually pays off quickly and often uncovers bits of historical material many have long forgotten to be relevant.
For instance, did they study how many of these "searcher" users accidentally deleted truly important emails because they couldn't easily tell them apart from all the other crap? No, relying on search alone to make your mountain of email data a useful resource makes about as much sense as keeping a watchdog that performs acceptably even though it really does eat your homework whenever it can...
Another useless article and useless waste of money by IBM.
I file emails automatically so when certain people email me I can find there emails faster and keep there requests separate so I don't confuse them. The project managers get there own folders, my boss and his boss have there own. It just makes the entire process much easier to find / respond and keep sorted everyone email.
The GTD guy said it best, which I've modified slightly for my own use. All new e-mail is either deleted or responded to if a response can be done in less that 2min. If I need to refer to it in the future, I drag to a "Processed" folder. All that remains in my inbox, is essentially my TODO list, with complete conversation history. If I ever need to refer to an old e-mail, just use search
Apparently the filers are using their inbox as a to-do list rather than wanting to categorize information to find it more easily.
God forbid that people would adapt a general-purpose tool to meet their personal needs.
Advice: on VPS providers
is not to make them easier to find.
It's to have less emails in the inbox to read every day. I don't need to read all the announcements stuff, all the bugs stuff. I just want to read the personally, directly address mail and see if theres anything urgent.
Then I still wanna keep the other ones so i can read through when i got time, or just search through later if i need them.
So there you have it; Sorting by folder has not much to do with actually searching for mails later on.
It's only about having only the important mails disturbing you with a "new mail notification". That's that.
Pretty sure It's what most use it for.
I have emails auto-filtered into an array of many-nested subfolders. I can see at a glance what 'category' new emails are in. Oh, to this distribution list? Ignore for now. This kind of notification? Read right away. Sent directly to inbox? Either useless or very important.
The benefit is that when I get 100 new emails during the course of a meeting, I don't have to even visually scan 100 messages. I can visually scan 20 subfolders to see which have the new messages, then concentrate on order of importance.
When searching, though, I search all. (Although I will usually click on the folder I *THINK* it should be in first, search there, then if I don't get what I want, click the "search all folders" link. Searching a single folder can be much faster, if I picked the right folder. And I pick the right one maybe 80% of the time.)
Another non-functioning site was "uncertainty.microsoft.com."
The purpose of that site was not known.
well, email filter exist for that reason... if people does not use filters, shoot in the head
keep emails *only* on a single folder, is a SPOF
various email client screw up when a "folder" get corrupted, for a know or a unknow reason (hardware limited, software limited, FS limited, power outage...)
so, create a filter to move emails to various folders is a sane thing to do.
on my point of view, is a pre-index, because uses the filesystem to index the emails
I prefer do a search in a 1k emails folder which 1gb of data instead
do a search on 10k emails folder which 45gb of unsorted garbage
I'm using Outlook at work. It has a Search, or at least some GUI with a text labels on it containing the chars "search". Sometimes it finds results. Sometimes it finds these results in record time, under 20 minutes, sometimes not. Sometimes the results actually contain search results, but usually not.
I do like Spam, however -- lots of it. No need to organize Spam, or search for that matter, heck I don't even have to read the Spam, I'm comfortable knowing that it's just there.
But my work emails, which sometimes contain more useful information than Spam, are required reading for my job. I could be coding, but instead I'm waiting for Outlook for find my highly-relevant search results.
That way e-mail is filed automaticly when received ( no time wasted by the user ). I started using filters before we had an enterprise spam filter and found that once I had all my filters set up, everything left in my in-box was spam, so I just cleared it. I rarely even need to search anymore and I can deal with e-mail in priority sequence based upon which folder it ends up in.
LInear search O(n), n-ary tree search using folders indexed by sending orginization/dept O(log(n))
Your e-mailbox is not a storage unit. Suppose you treated your real physical mailbox the way people treat their e-mailbox. You would open it, dig thru it, decide to take a few items out, and shove the rest back in. How do you think your (real, physical) mail delivery person would respond to that? Well, that's how your email system administrator feels about the current situation.
In other news, a study just published in Nature claims that studies aren't really very informative at all. Expect a retraction shortly, though.
My company runs exchange, so I have to run Outlook.
Search on Outlook is slow and clumsy.
I only use it under duress (i.e. when I absolutely can not find what I am looking for any other way.)
And when I do use it, I only find what I am seeking maybe half the time.
My personal email is in files in directories, and I search it with find/grep.
This is simple, fast, and usually successful.
The study could not possibly have pondered the time taken when you work in a government agency subject to a Freedom of Information Act request, or a private company in a lawsuit. Providing every email message related to project X is nearly impossible without having filed them at the time.
While it is, no doubt, true that those who do not file stuff can find what they want faster with search than those who do can with their folders, I suspect that those who do file find stuff faster in their folders than those who file stuff would with search.
To each his own. Not everybody benefits from the same methods.
There not forced to use Outlook 2000 connected to an antiquated NT4 network.... damn I wish my company would get out of the stone age.
or around my office floor, or for that matter clothes on my wardrobe floor - what would my life be - a mess !
I cull emails ruthlessly and spend some time filing others - search works just as well whether you have 1 folder or 100.
I always wanted a tag-based (key-phrase/word ) classification system for emails. It would allow multiple tags per message, and would tell you if the tag is new or on the list (used already), kind of like a spell-checker.
Table-ized A.I.
Interestingly, Microsoft have a recommendation for limiting the number of items in a single folder view for performance reasons. From the horses mouth...
You can help avoid poor performance in Outlook by carefully managing the number of items in folders, especially the Outlook folders that are heavily used. These folders include the Inbox, Calendar, Tasks, and Sent Items folders and any other heavily used folders.
The recommended number of items in a folder depends on several factors. These factors include the client's proximity to the server, the storage infrastructure, the load on the hard disks, the number of users, and the number of restricted views.
We recommend that you maintain a range of 3,500 to 5,000 items in a folder depending on the capacity of the Exchange Server environment. Additionally, you can create more top-level folders or create sub-folders underneath the Inbox and Sent Items folders. When you do this, the costs that are associated with index creation will be greatly reduced if the number of items in any one folder does not exceed 5,000.
Put my ebay emails in ebay folder so I don't see them when I am looking at work emails.
This is coming from the bone-heads that created Notes, which is the most cumbersome email software I've ever used. Also, I categorize emails, such as "Funny", "Reference" etc. Searching for email specifically would assume that the person who sent the email placed enough information in the subject and body for their crappy indexing to catalogue.
I have to file emails because very often there's no adequate search term. For example, I create folders for different customers. When I want to look at emails for customer XYZ, I click the XYZ folder. Nice. Many times there is nothing in the title, body, or recipient list that will unambiguously denote that an email is related to customer XYZ. Besides, I don't want to type anything, I just want to click XYZ.
I personally know three of the authors, so my accounting is more faithful :) . They didn't use Lotus Notes, as you said it's unworkable. Instead, they put together a mini front-end for the server: a diluted version of Notes, Notes a la Gmail (RTFA). Searching is also handled differently.
I rarely respond to comments. Also, don't ask for clarifications: a brain and Google are faster, believe me!
Perhaps the good folk at Big Blue have never heard of filters...
It is very dis-organized to put all your crap in one place...just think of it...Why not put all your clothes in one pile in the bedroom so that it is more efficient to get dressed in the morning...yeah much better!
1 Email is not searchable by anyone except original recipient/sender under EU law (Emails even at work are private). Remove email address on someone leaving and all acces to correspondence is lost.
2. Thus always have everyone hold email in email if they want, but enforce saving text copy to project folder in company archives.(readable and backed up relevant authority access)
3.Otherwise how do you answer a lawsuit or search warrant for correspondence (hard copies?). Failure to keep 'commercial' data anything of financial impact could be jail if required and it is not available at court or tax authorities request....
Speed is totally irrelevant. Especially if you're talking a second or so, its idiotic to think like that. Organising what you see and what you use in order for your brain can work better is really what you want.
You use the filter feature to automatically move the emails into folders. AND the search to find them. What a useless study.
then why don't they just get rid of all the TLDs on the net? After all, per IBM, having broad top level categories for things is less efficient than having one big honking search engine that is totally dependent on your ability to figure out something unique about what you are looking for. Instead, the Internet continues to be divided into an ever greater number of "folders".
All in all, this sounds to me like another one of those "Coke is really a diet food" type studies that chases a desired conclusion.
For me filing my emails is not about finding them any faster, but about workflow. Filing an email is an indication to myself that I have dealt with the email. Anything in my Inbox is still waiting to be processed. I have not found a better method of workflow yet.
I only use folders for things that are "done". That keeps my inbox open for "to do" and I delete everything that is just junk or not an action item. The only reason I keep folders is to CYA - if I didn't have to do that in this fallen world then there would be only inbox and trash. To find something I use search right of the bat ...
I file by project because the archive then gets saved with the project on our server. Later anyone needing info on what was said and done can find it.
Correct. DATA IS DATA. You may have all the reasoning in the world why your system works with key words being hard to recall, and such, but for all you who think folders are Superior, the data has spoken that it is, in fact, NOT. Accept data people. What else do we have? That said, while there may be some people who truly are faster with folders, this ruling should promote enterprise roll out and support of proficient search tools.