Email Overload

10/25/2004

A great productivity enhancer? Ha! E-mail can be a tremendous waste of time unless you know how to tame the savage beast, says Stever Robbins.

by Stever Robbins

Being at or near the the top of your organization, everyone wants a piece of you. So they send you e-mail. It makes you feel important. Don't you love it? Really? Then, please take some of mine! Over 100 real e-mails come in each day. At three minutes apiece, it will take five hours just to read and respond. Let's not even think about the messages that take six minutes of work to deal with. Shudder. I'm buried in e-mail and chances are, you're not far behind. For whatever reason, everyone feels compelled to keep you "in the loop."

Fortunately, being buried alive under electronic missives forced me to develop coping strategies. Let me share some of the nonobvious ones with you. Together, maybe we can start a revolution.

The problem is that readers now bear the burden
Before e-mail, senders shouldered the burden of mail. Writing, stamping, and mailing a letter was a lot of work. Plus, each new addressee meant more postage, so we thought hard about whom to send things to. (Is it worth spending thirty-two cents for Loren to read this letter? Nah….)

E-mail bludgeoned that system in no time. With free sending to an infinite number of people now a reality, every little thought and impulse becomes instant communication. Our most pathetic meanderings become deep thoughts that we happily blast to six dozen colleagues who surely can't wait. On the receiving end, we collect these gems of wisdom from the dozens around us. The result: Inbox overload.

("But my incoming e-mail is important," you cry. Don't fool yourself. Time how long you spend at your inbox. Multiply by your per-minute wage(*) to find out just how much money you spend on e-mail. If you can justify that expense, far out—you're one of the lucky ones. But for many, incoming e-mail is a money suck. Bonus challenge: do this calculation companywide.)

(*) Divide your yearly salary by 120,000 to get your per-minute wage.

Taming e-mail means training the senders to put the burden of quality back on themselves.

How you can send better e-mail
What's the best way to train everyone around you to better e-mail habits? You guessed it: You go first. First, you say, "In order for me to make you more productive, I'm going to adopt this new policy to lighten your load…" Demonstrate a policy for a month, and if people like it, ask them to start doing it too.

• Use a subject line to summarize, not describe.

People scan their inbox by subject. Make your subject rich enough that your readers can decide whether it's relevant. The best way to do this is to summarize your message in your subject.

BAD SUBJECT:	GOOD SUBJECT:
Subject: Deadline discussion	Subject: Recommend we ship product April 25th

• Give your reader full context at the start of your message.

Too many messages forwarded to you start with an answer—"Yes! I agree. Apples are definitely the answer"—without offering context. We must read seven included messages, notice that we were copied, and try to figure out what apples are the answer to. Even worse, we don't really know if we should care. Oops! We just noticed there are ten messages about apples. One of the others says "Apples are definitely not the answer." And another says, "Didn't you get my message about apples?" But which message was sent first? And which was in response to which? ARGH!

It's very, very difficult to get to the core of the issue.

You're probably sending e-mail because you're deep in thought about something. Your reader is too, only they're deep in thought about something else. Even worse, in a multi-person conversation, messages and replies may arrive out of order. And no, it doesn't help to include the entire past conversation when you reply; it's rude to force someone else to wade through ten screens of messages because you're too lazy to give them context. So, start off your messages with enough context to orient your reader.

BAD E-MAIL:	GOOD E-MAIL:
To: Billy Franklin From: Robert Payne Subject: Re: Re: Re: Please bring contributions to the charity drive Yes, apples are definitely the answer.	To: Billy Franklin From: Robert Payne Subject: Re: Re: Re: Please bring contributions to the charity drive. You asked if we want apple pie. Yes, apples are definitely the answer.

• When you copy lots of people (a heinous practice that should be used sparingly), mark out why each person should care.

Just because you send a message to six poor coworkers doesn't mean all six know what to do when they get it. Ask yourself why you're sending to each recipient, and let them know at the start of the message what they should do with it. Big surprise, this also forces you to consider why you're including each person.

BAD CC:	GOOD CC:
To: Abby Gail, Bill Fold, Cindy Rella Subject: Web site design draft is done   The Web site draft is done. Check it out in the attached file. The design firm will need our responses by the end of the week.	To: Abby Gail, Bill Fold, Cindy Rella Subject: Web site design draft is done AG: DECISION NEEDED. Get marketing to approve the draft BF: PLEASE VERIFY. Does the slogan capture our branding? CR: FYI, if we need a redesign, your project will slip. The Web site draft is done. Check it out in the attached file. The design firm will need our responses by the end of the week.

• Use separate messages rather than bcc (blind carbon copy).

If you bcc someone "just to be safe," think again. Ask yourself what you want the "copied" person to know, and send a separate message if needed.Yes, it's more work for you, but if we all do it, it's less overload.

BAD BCC:	GOOD BCC:
To: Fred Bcc: Chris Please attend the conference today at 2:00 p.m.	To: Fred Please attend the conference today at 2:00 p.m. To: Chris Please reserve the conference room for me and Fred today at 2:00 p.m.

• Make action requests clear.

If you want things to get done, say so. Clearly. There's nothing more frustrating as a reader than getting copied on an e-mail and finding out three weeks later that someone expected you to pick up the project and run with it. Summarize action items at the end of a message so everyone can read them at one glance.

• Separate topics into separate e-mails … up to a point.

If someone sends a message addressing a dozen topics, some of which you can respond to now and some of which you can't, send a dozen responses—one for each topic. That way, each thread can proceed unencumbered by the others.

Do this when mixing controversy with mundania. That way, the mundane topics can be taken care of quietly, while the flame wars can happen separately.

BAD MIXING OF ITEMS:	GOOD MIXING OF ITEMS:
We need to gather all the articles by February 1st. Speaking of which, I was thinking … do you think we should fire Sandy?	Message #1: We need to gather all the articles by February 1st. Message #2: Sandy's missed a lot of deadlines recently. Do you think termination is in order?

• Combine separate points into one message.

Sometimes the problem is the opposite—sending 500 tiny messages a day will overload someone, even if the intent is to reduce this by creating separate threads. If you are holding a dozen open conversations with one person, the slowness of typing is probably substantial overhead. Jot down all your main points on a piece of (gasp) paper, pick up the phone, and call the person to discuss those points. I guarantee you'll save a ton of time.

• Edit forwarded messages.

For goodness sake, if someone sends you a message, don't forward it along without editing it. Make it appropriate for the ultimate recipient and make sure it doesn't get the original sender in trouble.

BAD FORWARDING:	GOOD FORWARDING:
To: Bill Sue's idea, described below, is great. --- From: Sue Hey, Abner: Let's take the new design and add sparkles around the border. Bill probably won't mind; his design sense is so garish he'll approve anything.	To: Bill Sue's idea, described below, is great. --- From: Sue Hey, Abner: Let's take the new design and add sparkles around the border…

• When scheduling a call or conference, include the topic in the invitation. It helps people prioritize and manage their calendar more effectively.

BAD E-MAIL:	GOOD E-MAIL:
Subject: Conference call Wednesday at 3:00 p.m.	Subject: Conference call Wednesday at 3:00 p.m. to review demo presentation.

• Make your e-mail one page or less.

Make sure the meat of your e-mail is visible in the preview pane of your recipient's mailer. That means the first two paragraphs should have the meat. Many people never read past the first screen, and very few read past the third.

• Understand how people prefer to be reached, and how quickly they respond.

Some people are so buried under e-mail that they can't reply quickly. If something is important, use the phone or make a follow-up phone call. Do it politely; a delay may not be personal. It might be that someone's overloaded. If you have time-sensitive information, don't assume people have read the e-mail you sent three hours ago rescheduling the meeting that takes place in five minutes. Pick up the phone and call.

How to read and receive e-mail
Setting a good example only goes so far. You also have to train others explicitly. Explain to them that you're putting some systems in place to help you manage your e-mail overload. Ask for their help, and know that they're secretly envying your strength of character.

• Check e-mail at defined times each day.

We hate telemarketers during dinner, so why do we tolerate e-mail when we're trying to get something useful done? Turn off your e-mail "autocheck" and only check e-mail two or three times a day, by hand. Let people know that if they need to reach you instantly, e-mail isn't the way. When it's e-mail processing time, however, shut the office door, turn off the phone, and blast through the messages.

• Use a paper "response list" to triage messages before you do any follow-up.

The solution to e-mail overload is pencil and paper? Who knew? Grab a legal pad and label it "Response list." Run through your incoming e-mails. For each, note on the paper what you have to do or whom you have to call. Resist the temptation to respond immediately. If there's important reference information in the e-mail, drag it to your Reference folder. Otherwise, delete it. Zip down your entire list of e-mails to generate your response list. Then, zip down your response list and actually do the follow-up.

• Charge people for sending you messages.

One CEO I've worked with charges staff members five dollars from their budget for each e-mail she receives. Amazingly, her overload has gone down, the relevance of e-mails has gone up, and the senders are happy, too, because the added thought often results in them solving more problems on their own.

• Train people to be relevant.

If you are constantly copied on things, begin replying to e-mails that aren't relevant with the single word: "Relevant?" Of course, you explain that this is a favor to them. Now, they can learn what is and isn't relevant to you. Beforehand, tell them the goal is to calibrate relevance, not to criticize or put them down and encourage them to send you relevancy challenges as well. Pretty soon, you'll be so well trained you'll be positively productive!

• Answer briefly.

When someone sends you a ten page missive, reply with three words. "Yup, great idea." You'll quickly train people not to expect huge answers from you, and you can then proceed to answer at your leisure in whatever format works best for you. If your e-mail volume starts getting very high, you'll have no choice.

• Send out delayed responses.

Type your response directly, but schedule it to be sent out in a few days. This works great for conversations that are nice but not terribly urgent. By inserting a delay in each go-around, you both get to breathe easier.

(In Outlook, choose Options when composing a message and select Do not deliver before. In Eudora, hold down the Shift key as you click Send.)

• Ignore it.

Yes, ignore e-mail. If something's important, you'll hear about it again. Trust me. And people will gradually be trained to pick up the phone or drop by if they have something to say. After all, if it's not important enough for them to tear their gaze away from the hypnotic world of Microsoft Windows, it's certainly not important enough for you to take the time to read.

Your only solution is to take action
Yeah, yeah, you have a million reasons why these ideas can never work in your workplace. Hogwash. I use every one of them and can bring at least a semblance of order to my inbox. So choose a technique and start applying it. While you practice, I'll be on vacation, accumulating a 2,000 message backlog for when I get home. If you want to know how well I cope, just send along an e-mail and ask….

E-mail avalanche even buries CEOs  By Del Jones,

(USA TODAY) In the three seconds it takes to read this sentence, more than a half-million e-mails will land in in-boxes. By 2005, nearly that many will land each second.

The e-mail avalanche knows no rank. "I don't think the secretary of Commerce, when he hired me, wanted me spending all my time surfing through it," says National Weather Service director Jack Kelly.

But increasingly, that's what's happening. 7-Eleven CEO Jim Keyes burns three to four hours of his day on 200 e-mails and is such a heavy user that if a top field executive or licensee were to phone him, he might not recognize the voice.

Bruce Rohde, CEO of ConAgra Foods, found out how quickly a single click can touch off an e-mail tsunami when he sent a global e-mail to all employees, as far away as Turkey and Holland, with a note aimed at alleviating anxiety over anthrax. Back came 1,000 responses, mostly notes of thanks, which kept him busy at home for the next three or four evenings.

But if CEOs like these, with the resources of a modern corporation behind them, are drowning, is there any hope for those of us in the deep end of the e-mail pool?

Under the theory that CEOs are among the most time-pressed, USA TODAY interviewed more than three dozen top executives to find out how they are coping with the steep rise in e-mail — and how they fight back.

From what they said, some answering via e-mail, it's clear that CEOs are still weighing the pros and cons of the rapidly increasing volume of electronic mail. While they welcome its efficiency, most chief executives told USA TODAY, they curse its inefficiency.

"Sure, it was time consuming," Rohde says about the response to his worldwide e-mail, but he adds that he welcomed hearing from employees who would typically be too intimidated to contact him. "People put CEOs on pedestals that shouldn't exist."

But Rohde says he is also "bombarded" by unwelcome e-mail, such as the one suggesting ConAgra grow genetically altered cactus as camel food. "I get scams. I get lots of citations from the Bible. I get extortions."

Still, e-mail lubricates communication across time zones and borders and with thousands at once. Charles Holliday, chief executive at DuPont, says overseas e-mail has helped him avoid international phone tag with customers and suppliers.

Mark Cuban, owner of the Dallas Mavericks basketball team, gives his e-mail address to fans, who tell him if there's bubble gum on the seats.

Translation software lets licensees in Japan send 7-Eleven's Keyes e-mail that he can readily understand. It has become so mission critical that some CEOs wonder whether their companies would grind to a halt without it.

Rising tide of e-mail

But the volume and time requirement threaten to engulf many chief executives. When asked for comment for this article, Sun Microsystems CEO Scott McNealy dashed off the following e-mail.

Listen to him panting:

"I get hundreds a day, I review them all, answer many, forward many for response, hate the junk, I type really fast, ignore perfect grammer and typin, getting more over time, but can read e-mail from any browser, have T1's into my homes and read all that is left from the day before I go to sleep after the boys go down and get up before they do to read what came in while sleeping."

At the end, McNealy hastily included a dig at nemesis Microsoft: "I HATE attachments, MSFT docs are the WORST! I send them back. Send me ascii. Hope this helps. Scott."

Everyone wants the chief executive's attention — and that is usually easier to get via e-mail than by mail or phone.

But sending an e-mail to the chief executive is no guarantee of success. "I don't read them, because you just get stacks and stacks of them," says Burger King CEO John Dasburg.

Raj Jaswa, CEO of software maker Selectica, deletes 80% of his e-mail without reading it. He suggests a strategy for getting through the CEO's e-mail clutter or anyone's clutter:

• Get the message across in the first two sentences.
• Get the name of the company or CEO you're approaching up high so that it's clear that the e-mail is not part of a mass mailing.
• Don't copy the e-mail to anyone else — again, to make it personal.

  And he adds this hook:

• Put the crucial point in a postscript (P.S.). Those always get read.

Addicted to e-mail

While some CEOs fight back with their delete key, most have decided to err on the side of e-mail addiction. "I am neurotic," e-mailed Bob Zollars, CEO of Web-based health care company Neoforma, who says he can't leave his office if he has unread e-mail.

Many CEOs say they often check their e-mail late at night or early in the morning, making those prime times to correspond in real time.

The huge volume of mail, though, has many chief executives finally turning e-mail over to administrative assistants for screening, just as they long ago turned over snail mail and phone calls.

But that doesn't work for everyone. Bob Longo, CEO of Carnegie Learning, and John Chang, CEO of SeeUthere Technologies, are among those who believe e-mail is too sensitive for eyes other than their own.

"If you want honest opinions, read your own e-mail," Chang says.

Even Dell Computer CEO Michael Dell, who spends several hours a day with the average 175 e-mails he receives and the 60 he sends, has no one culling for obvious garbage.

More tethered to e-mail

Rather than delegate e-mail, many CEOs are growing increasingly tied to it, not only in the office but anywhere and everywhere, through the use of wireless technology.

Their tool of choice is the BlackBerry, a wireless device that displays e-mail remotely at the same time it lands at their desks. Its nickname is the "CrackBerry" because of its addictive qualities.

"You know those pregnant pauses you have on elevators? That's a great time to pull out a BlackBerry and get some work done," says Raul Fernandez, CEO of Dimension Data North America and part owner of the Washington sports teams Capitals, Wizards and Mystics.

Dell carries a BlackBerry to check e-mail away from his desk and delegate as needed. 7-Eleven's Keyes uses his BlackBerry at traffic lights, employing fine-tuned "thumb" proficiency to respond on a tiny keyboard.

Indeed, the exploding use of wireless e-mail devices is behind the coming swell of more e-mail. According to BWCS Consulting, 75% of corporate e-mail subscribers will be transmitting via wireless devices by 2006.

Instant messages as e-mail

A few CEOs, looking for ways to stay in touch despite the e-mail onslaught, are so cutting edge that they're moving into the world of 12-year-olds. Tom Pincince, the 38-year-old CEO of Brix Networks, uses AOL Instant Messenger to "chat" in real time with his "buddy list" of about 50 high-ranking employees, investors and key customers.

Buddy lists are becoming to e-mail what cell phones are to land lines: Only the most important get the number, or in this case, the AOL screen name. "It's five to 10 times as productive as e-mail," Pincince says.

Consultants predict that the only things that will slow the growth of e-mail are instant messaging and Web-based virtual private networks, or VPNs, where company communications are recorded in one place. The goal of VPNs is to eliminate the need to search six months' worth of e-mail to find information and to ensure that no employees get left out of the loop.

Priorities needed

If e-mail is to survive as an efficient tool, Microsoft and others will have to be increasingly industrious in finding new ways to screen and prioritize e-mail, Authoria's Tod Loofbourrow says.

But even if volume triples by 2005, so be it, Chang says. "I think e-mail is replacing other forms of communication. I don't receive paper mail from anyone except at Christmastime. E-mail is going up, but the overall time communicating is not going up."

There's no such thing as overcommunication, Keyes says — a theory that will soon be severely tested.

Unless, of course, CEOs take a tip from George Johnson, CEO of software maker Cosmi, who has taken perhaps the boldest step of all to hold back the e-mail deluge: He doesn't have a computer at work or at home.

By Ina Fried
http://news.com.com/SNARFing+your+way+through+e-mail/2100-1032_3-5979217.html

Story last modified Fri Dec 02 05:46:16 PST 2005

With the world's in-boxes overflowing with unread messages, researchers at Microsoft are offering up a tool they hope will help people sort through the morass.

The software maker this week released a free utility that aims to sort e-mail in a new way: It can organize messages not just by how recent they are, but also by whether the recipient knows the sender well.

The program, known as SNARF, bases its approach on the fact that people tend to interact more with messages from those they care about.

News.context

What's new:
Microsoft researchers are offering up a tool, called SNARF, that uses social analysis of e-mail use to enable people to organize the messages in their in-boxes.

Bottom line:
The technology aims to help people sort through the morass of incoming e-mail more effectively. Though they are now part of a research project, SNARF features could make their way into products soon.

More stories on this topic

"You don't respond to everybody, and not everybody responds to you," said Marc Smith, one of the Microsoft researchers who developed SNARF, or Social Network And Relationship Finder.

Though SNARF is a research project for now, Microsoft said that similar features could soon make their way into its e-mail products.

Smith boils it down this way. His computer, for all its power, serves up his e-mail without distinguishing junk mail from messages sent by close friends. His dog, on the other hand, learns who his friends are and stops barking at them.

"If my dog can tell who strangers are, apart from friends...my e-mail reader should be able to do the same," he said.

The task is increasingly important as people become overloaded with e-mail. Though many like to be alerted to new messages, the barrage of notifications is now so frequent for many workers that it is nearly impossible to get any creative work done without being interrupted.

"The machines got us into this problem," Smith said. "They are going to have to get us out of it."

Smith calls today's method of sorting e-mail the "ADD sort order," in which the newest messages are constantly presented first, regardless of who sent them. There has to be a better way, he said.

Figuring out who your friends are may not seem like a task well-suited to computers, but Smith said it's simply a matter of making sure that the computer is adding up the right things.

"The beautiful thing about computers is that they are really, at their core, accounting machines. They love to count things. Social relationships are countable," Smith said.

In SNARF's case, the software looks at how often people correspond with particular content in the body of a message and how often they reply to one another's correspondence, among other things.

The concept is not new. The idea of "social sorting" has been explored by Microsoft and others for years. Researchers at Hewlett-Packard, for example, looked at the patterns of who e-mailed who within HP Labs. Doing so, the researchers found, turned out to be a more effective means of determining working groups than looking at an organizational chart.

How it works

SNARF begins indexing e-mail messages on initial launch. Once it's finished indexing, it shows a window with three panes.

Top pane: People who have sent recent e-mail addressed or cc'd to the mailbox owner. Messages are unread.

Middle pane:  People who have sent recent, unread e-mail addressed to anyone.

Bottom pane: All people mentioned in any e-mail the mailbox owner has received in the past week.

A configuration panel enables users to change the types of messages displayed and to sort them in different ways.

A user can choose to double-click on a contact's name and see a list of all recent e-mail from that person. The tool also works with mailing lists: People can sort messages by threads and in chronological order.

Source:  Microsoft Research

Microsoft has also used social sorting to help users wade through Internet forums, in a research effort known as NetScan.

Smith points out that our PCs already know tons about us, in many cases storing years' worth of messages and replies. "This is more than the diarists of the 17th and 18th centuries," he said.

SNARF can also sort messages based on whether they were sent directly to you, whether you were copied on the message or whether you were part of a distribution list.

While such an approach can help sort through the sea of messages, it's not flawless. Smith noted that not everyone who is important to him returns his e-mails.

"My mother, I'm sorry to say, just never replies to my e-mail," he said, quickly noting that it's no reflection on the quality of his relationship with her.

Smith said there is a strong chance the social sorting techniques will find their way into Microsoft products. There have been feelers from the teams responsible for Outlook, Exchange, Hotmail and Outlook Express, he said.

"We're having lots of meetings with people," Smith said.

For now, the research team has put its software out there as a download for people to experiment with. Officially, Microsoft says SNARF will definitely work with Outlook 2003 and Windows XP Service Pack 2, though Smith said it may work with other software. SNARF also requires the .Net framework, though it will install it if a computer does not already have the operating system add-on.

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Driven to distraction

Desperate for some time to think, people are coming up with low-tech strategies to get away from their technology.

Smith is also working on expanding the research project in several ways. For example, the current version cannot be customized so that a user can say that a certain friend is important, even though they only exchange e-mail once a year.

Allowing users to "tag" e-mails in various ways is among the features that the company is looking at. "We are exploring a range of ideas around that," he said. "It's a very important direction," he added, noting that the next version of Outlook also includes new tagging capabilities.

Moving onto cell phones would be another good move for SNARF, he said. "If you are not at your computer to do triage, having 150 e-mails can be daunting," he said. "It would be nice to have the seven e-mails from colleagues in a separate folder."