Bit Literacy - Mark Hurst [8]
E-mail load is measured by the number of messages sitting in the user’s inbox. Inboxes containing one or two thousand e-mails aren’t uncommon in the business world, and yet many users who carry such a load still claim that they feel fine. (The biggest message count I’ve ever heard, and I’m not making this up, was 150,000. That user said he did not feel fine.) There are several reasons why many people end up overloaded by e-mail.
Some users seem to enjoy having lots of messages. Like Busy Man, they grow accustomed to the feeling of urgency from having so many e-mails to react to. In fact, a bulging inbox can be a perverse source of pride. It “proves” that they’re important—that is, more important than their colleagues—and gives an excuse for their confused, rushed behavior. Such people are of course the least effective, since they spend their time scrambling and can’t work or think clearly.
For other users it can feel lonely not to have at least some e-mails in the inbox, constantly calling for their attention. “E-mails are sort of like friends,” someone told me once. “I’ll miss them if they’re all gone.” Having no e-mails forces the user to get on with real work—as managed by the todo list, described in the next chapter—and doing work is hard. It’s easier to stay distracted by the messages in the inbox, so as to avoid more demanding activities.
The most common reason for overload, however, is that people often use the inbox for purposes it wasn’t designed for:
Todo list: Users often keep action items in the inbox. Buried under other messages, they’re hard to find and easy to forget.
Filing system: Meeting notes, project status messages, attachments containing proposals, and other important documents often sit in the inbox, instead of going to a proper project folder.
Calendar: Dates and times for meetings, conference calls, and other appointments pile up in the inbox, often sticking around long after the appointment has passed.
Bookmarks list: Some e-mails remain in the inbox because they contain Web addresses, or usernames and passwords for website logins, that the user isn’t sure where to store.
Address book: Messages containing phone numbers and postal addresses of contacts sit in the inbox instead of being entered into an actual address book.
It’s a mistake to rely on the e-mail inbox for any of these functions. The inbox is appropriate only as a temporary holding place for e-mails, briefly, before they’re deleted or moved elsewhere. Here it’s important to distinguish between e-mail and what it communicates. E-mail is just a medium; the content determines what the message truly is and where it belongs. Users should use the right tool for each kind of message: a todo list for todos, a calendar to store appointments, and so on. No message, no matter what it says, belongs in the inbox.
The inbox is like the sorting room at the post office, where envelopes come in bearing different messages and are quickly whisked away to the right place. Or consider that an incoming e-mail has the shelf life of Chinese takeout in the refrigerator. It’s best to eat it as soon as it arrives; within a day is OK, but after that it starts to get funky. Now imagine a refrigerator full of thousands of takeout containers, some of them years old. Like a misused inbox, it’s unsafe for new additions and unpleasant to deal with.
The Solution
The solution to e-mail overload lies in addressing the root of the problem: the number of current distractions. Every e-mail staring us in the face is competing for our attention with every other e-mail we have. An inbox bulging with messages is demoralizing because it reminds us how much work we still have to do, and how far behind we are in doing it.
E-mail load is often measured, inaccurately, in terms of message volume. Whenever people complain that they get fifty or a hundred messages a day, they’re talking about their volume—the number of daily incoming messages. But volume