* The key to lessening e-mail overload
A study that was published in early August by researchers from Glasgow University and Paisley University discovered that many people are stressed by having to view and respond to e-mails.
A study that was published in early August by researchers from Glasgow University and Paisley University discovered that many people are stressed by having to view and respond to e-mails.
The study found that one-half of people check their e-mail more than once every hour and one third are stressed by the volume of e-mail they receive and the perception that they must respond to e-mails in a timely fashion. The study also found that many e-mail users work in a fragmented way, switching frequently from what they’re doing to check for new e-mail.
A study that we conducted recently found similar results: many people check e-mail almost constantly. Plus, the problem will get worse as the volume of e-mail continues to grow and as more users acquire mobile e-mail devices, enabling them to receive more e-mail more frequently.
Some people suggest reducing e-mail overload by establishing personal policies for how frequently e-mail is checked, ignoring e-mail on which they are merely copied along with other individuals, etc. While those approaches may be good for some individuals, they essentially work by limiting the amount of information that is received, not by making information transfer more efficient.
I believe that the key lessening to e-mail overload and user stress is simply to use basic tools like wikis and RSS feeds. That’s obviously not a new idea, but these tools are underused as a substitute for e-mail in most corporate environments. A wiki, for example, can aggregate comments about a project into a single Web page that allows users to scan for changes, news and other important information without having to read one e-mail after another that provides this information in a less efficient way. RSS feeds can be used for similar aggregation purposes.
Using wikis and RSS feeds represents a win-win situation for everyone: users can access information more efficiently and IT spends less on storage and bandwidth to process e-mail.
