Am I wasting my time organizing email?

Whittaker, Steve; Matthews, Tara; Cerruti, Julian; Badenes, Hernan; Tang, John C.

doi:10.1145/1978942.1979457

Cited by 85 publications

(76 citation statements)

References 19 publications

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“…Similarly, (large amounts of automatically acquired) email forces users to opportunistically access email and to rarely relying on folder structures . Other organisational techniques such as tags have not been observed for any information type, which is consistent with other PIM studies (Civan et al, 2009;Whittaker et al, 2011).…”

Section: Organizing Project Informationsupporting

confidence: 91%

An empirical study of long-term personal project information management

Pucihar

Kljun

Mariani

et al. 2016

Aslib Journal of Information Management

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Purpose: Personal projects are any kind of projects whose management is left to an individual untrained in project management and is greatly influenced by this individual's personal touch. This includes the majority of knowledge workers who daily manage information relating to several personal projects. We have conducted an in-depth qualitative investigation on information management of such projects and the tacit knowledge behind its processes that cannot be found in the organisational structures of current Personal Information Management (PIM) tools (file managers, email clients, web browsers). The aim is to reveal and understand project information management practices in details and provide guidelines for personal project management tools.Design/methodology/approach: Semi-structured interviews similar to that in several other PIM exploratory studies were carried out focusing on project fragmentation, information overlap and project context recreation. In addition, we enhanced interviews with sketching approach not yet used to study PIM. Sketches ware used for articulating things that were not easily expressed through words, they represented a time stamp of a project context in the projects' lifetime, uncovered additional tacit knowledge behind project information management not mentioned during the interviews, and were also used to find what they have in common which might be used in prototype designing. Findings:The paper presents first personal project definition based on the conceptualisations derived from the study. The study revealed that the extensive information fragmentation in the file hierarchy (due to different organisational needs and ease of information access) poses a significant challenge to context recreation besides cross-tool fragmentation so far described in the literature. The study also reveals the division of project information into core and support and emphasises the importance of support information in relation to project goals. Other findings uncover the division of input/output information, project overlaps through information reuse, storytelling and visualising information relations, which could help with user modeling and enhancing project context recreation. Research limitations/implications:One of the limitations is the group of participants that cannot represent the ideally generalised knowledge worker as there are many different kinds of knowledge workers and they all have different information needs besides different management practices. However, participants of variety of different backgrounds were observed and we converged observations into points of project information management similarities across the spectrum of different professions. Nevertheless, its observations and conceptualisations should be repeatable. For one, some of the issues that emerged during this work have been to different extents discussed in other studies. Practical implications:The empirical findings are used to create guidelines for designing personal project information management tools:-s...

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Section: Organizing Project Informationsupporting

confidence: 91%

An empirical study of long-term personal project information management

Pucihar

Kljun

Mariani

et al. 2016

Aslib Journal of Information Management

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…Email overload is just one facet of information overload and is prompted by the sense of having to deal with and prioritize a considerable volume of incoming messages (Szóstek, 2011). Moreover, the tasks involved in email management are myriad: once a message arrives into a users' inbox, the users must attempt to evaluate the content and urgency of the message based on visible cues such as sender name and subject line, must decide whether and when to read, reply and/or file the email, or indeed, to do nothing at all, and must engage in the actions required to respond to the email (Siu et al, 2006;Szóstek, 2011;Whittaker, Matthews, Cerruti, Badenes, & Tang, 2011). The challenges posed by the attempt to organize, store, manage and retrieve this overabundance of information can provoke sense of stress, inhibit decision-making abilities, impair work-life balance and lower productivity (Barley, Meyerson, & Grodal, 2011;Mazmanian, Orlikowski, & Yates, 2013;Waller & Ragsdell, 2012).…”

Section: Previous Research Email and Information Overload Theorymentioning

confidence: 99%

Email subject lines and response rates to invitations to participate in a web survey and a face-to-face interview: the sound of silence

Sappleton

Lourenço

2015

International Journal of Social Research Methodology

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“…Categories of activities have also been proposed by researchers working within the PKM domain. Razmerita, Kirchner, and Sudzina [7] [13] studied personal e-mail practices. On the other hand, an early study by Barreau and Nardi [14] investigated ways in which people organized and searched their computer files.…”

Section: A Personal Information Managementmentioning

confidence: 99%

A Study of Personal Information Management Strategies for Online Faculty

Kearns

Frey

Tomer

et al. 2014

OLJ

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The literature suggests that personal information management is a serious challenge for many computer users. Online faculty are especially challenged because of the large number of electronic files necessitated by teaching online. Those who have experience in this environment may offer valuable insights regarding information management challenges and practices. Faculty who teach online courses as part of the WISE (Web-based Information Science Education) Consortium responded to a survey that questioned the ways they manage e-mail, computer desktops, web-based information, and learning management systems. The authors concluded that "filter failure" rather than information overload is the key issue in information management. The study concludes with a list of recommendations for faculty to manage their personal information.

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Am I wasting my time organizing email?

Cited by 85 publications

References 19 publications

An empirical study of long-term personal project information management

An empirical study of long-term personal project information management

Email subject lines and response rates to invitations to participate in a web survey and a face-to-face interview: the sound of silence

A Study of Personal Information Management Strategies for Online Faculty

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