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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)
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.
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
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?
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
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.
Wouldn't your mail client indicate that you have N unread e-mails (sometimes configurable to only show those N from up to M days ago) in the folder it was sorted to?
Pretty hard to miss.
I do think the researchers' claim is a bit silly, but your concern is tangential with another..
The researchers checked two groups:
1. Those who simply let the computer search their entire inbox (be that with or without sorted folders) for the e-mail.
2. Those who go to the sorted folder they believe the e-mail to be in, and then manually look through all of the e-mails in that folder hoping to spot it.
The second group isn't very realistic. More commonly (that I've seen), that group goes to the folder that they believe the e-mail to be in, and then let the computer search that folder. That means the computer doesn't have to look through, say, 2,000 e-mails - it only has to look through, say, 100.
Depending on whether or not the computer can scan every folder faster than you can click to the folder, the latter can be much faster. Certainly on older computers with slow harddisks.
However, there is one problem that crops up... what if the folder you think the e-mail is in, is not where it actually is. What if the e-mail from John about Vacation isn't in the folder 'John' but in the folder 'Vacation'?
That's where time is usually wasted, which often results in having to search all of the folders anyway if you don't remember which other folder(s) it might be in.
I think the vastly increased speed with which e-mails can be searched - especially if you use e.g. gmail which can search many times faster than your home box - does mean that folders become less important in terms of organizing e-mails for faster retrieval purposes. They'll still have their place for organization in general, though (i.e. 'work' vs 'personal') - but alongside tags and 'search folders'.
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.
I must be getting very old.
Why click through tags even if you DO use them? You can use the "label:blah" (i think, or it might be "infolder:" )as a search term to search combinations of them, including negative combinations.
Can you be Even More Awesome?!
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.
... 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.
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.