Email awareness
I have a terrible time with email overload. I process approximately 100 real emails (not spam) per day. Some are basically irrelevant and I can delete them immediately, some require more attention, and often, I get backlogged by weeks or even months on things that I would read if I could get to them.
My big issue is that others have no awareness of why I’m not emailing back. Gone? Backlogged? Accidentally spam filtered? My grad students maintain a reasonable amount of awareness of this by seeing me face to face at regular intervals, where ‘Have you read my message X’ has become a frequent refrain. But they can usually tell how maxed out I am, and when email is the right communication mode, and others can’t.
So here are some awareness things that I wish I had time to implement:
- Instant backlog feedback. It might be annoying but what if there were a tracking system, like a UPS tracking number, that got emailed back immediately. ‘Your email is number 150 in the queue. Click this link to see whether your email has been opened.’ and so on.
- Cost of email–part 1. Another problem is people don’t realize the total costs of messages they send out. So here’s an idea, what if you track how long people have your message open (and any related attachments) and let them track how much people-hours they are spending. Mailing lists in particular could benefit from this greatly. I’ve had to explain to people that emailing, for instance, an the entire college of education at my university is like making a public address announcement in four buildings. Even if each person only spends two minutes processing an email, in our case that is probably about 8 hours of total staff time. It would be even more effective if a dollar amount based on aggregated wages was associated with this.
- Cost of email–part 2. And then there are the replies. It would be helpful to me (and wouldn’t even require a tracking system) if my own email program could show how long I spent composing a message. And perhaps that also should be put in the message headers so others can see how much time/energy their requests to you cost, in terms of a reply, or could see how much somebody is willing to waste your time to save theirs.
Joel Galbraith said,
April 12, 2007 @ 2:45 pm
Some interesting ideas Chris. Does the “cost” of such data only increase the cost of the whole emailing system for people–now we not only have the emails to read,but we have to deal with/read/have others see our stats as well.
This seems like the end result might defeat the purpose of your efforts–even though the idea has merit.
(your post just cost me 1:30 plus the time to go back to what I was doing)
-Joel G.
tophe said,
April 23, 2007 @ 9:27 am
LOL. I should say ‘back to work! that 1:30 is on the clock!’ But of course learning and discussion is part of the work
The last thing I want is for the emails to take longer to process. But other than the tracking number thing, it wouldn’t necessarily intrude on the email reading, indeed it might speed it up.
Wacky idea: what if the font size of the email header grew or shrank in the inbox headers window depending on message body length, and it became ‘hotter’ (maybe more red? more boldface?) as the time spent composing went up? then it would be easy at a glance what people had spent time and energy on.
I hate the column that tells you in your inbox how many bytes the message is. That USED to be useful, when messages were all text. Now that html allows arbitrary inflation of the message without adding any more body text, the ‘bytes’ column is basically only useful to tell how big peoples attachments to you are.
This response just cost 3:37