Quality versus quantity: e-mail-centric task management and its relation with overload

  • Authors:

  • Victoria Bellotti;Nicolas Ducheneaut;Mark Howard;Ian Smith;Rebecca E. Grinter

  • Affiliations:

  • Palo Alto Research Center, Palo Alto, CA;Palo Alto Research Center, Palo Alto, CA;Palo Alto Research Center, Palo Alto, CA;Intel Research Seattle, Seattle, WA and Palo Alto Research Center, Palo Alto, CA;GVU Center - TSRB College of Computing, Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, GA and Palo Alto Research Center, Palo Alto, CA

  • Venue:
  • Human-Computer Interaction
  • Year:
  • 2005

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Abstract

It is widely acknowledged that many professionals suffer from "e-mail overload." This article presents findings from in-depth fieldwork that examined this phenomenon, uncovering six key challenges of taskmanagement in e-mail. Analysis of qualitative and quantitative data suggests that it is not simply the quantity but also the collaborative quality of e-mail task and project management that causes this overload. We describe how e-mail becomes especially overwhelming when people use it for tasks that involve participation of others; tasks cannot be completed until a response is obtained and so they are interleaved. Interleaving means that the email user must somehow simultaneously keep track of multiple incomplete tasks, often with the only reminder for each one being an e-mail message somewhere in the inbox or a folder. This and other insights from our fieldwork led us to a new design philosophy for e-mail in which resources for task and project management are embedded directly within an e-mail client as opposed to being added on as separate components of the application. A client, TaskMaster, embodying these ideas, was developed and tested by users in managing their real e-mail over an extended period. The design of the client and results of its evaluation are also reported.