Craig Roth: E-mail Overload: No Cure, but Enterprise Attention Management Can Shed Some Light
June 12 2009
Burton Group's Craig Roth is thinking about e-mail overload:
The most popular "overload" topic in offices today is e-mail. But after all these years of incremental improvement to IBM Lotus Notes and Microsoft Exchange, surely there can't be any low-hanging fruit left to pick to help people manage inbox overload. Or is there? ...
Here I use it [his Enterprise Attention Management Conceptual Architecture] as an intuition pump to reveal a set of potential enhancements to e-mail software that would improve its attentional characteristics.
Click on the thumbnail below and scroll around to see the ideas that came out of my informal analysis of e-mail.
Craig pinged me and asked, how many of these does Lotus Notes do? I found a number of his ideas that are addressed, or can be through customization, within Notes/Domino. But I thought a more interesting exercise, and a good way to keep the blog busy for a couple of days while I'm on vacation, is to ask you which of these attention management issues you've addressed in your e-mail environment. Surely, someone will pay attention to this blog entry?
Link: Craig Roth: E-mail Overload: No Cure, but Enterprise Attention Management Can Shed Some Light >
Post a Comment
- 2
Neil Wainwright http://www.nexonia.com | 6/12/2009 11:32:18 PM
How about some simple LotusScript-driven tools to give users the ability to cleanse their mail file. "Delete all from same user", "Delete all from same domain", etc. That would be nice...I still miss this kind of feature for cleaning up my mail. Just my two cents.
...Neil
- 3
John Foldager http://www.johnfoldager.com | 6/13/2009 2:37:30 AM
I'd like the ability (in the standard inbox - no custom modifications) to hide the "Send" button so that my "Alt+1" would choose "Send and File..." instead of just Send. This would 'remind' me of archiving outgoing emails in the correct folder. Would even be nice to be able to archive in multiple folders at this stage.
- 4
Craig Roth http://knowledgeforward.wordpress.com | 6/13/2009 7:57:34 PM
There's an effort underway to track how many of the EAM improvements I'd like to see are currently addressed by Notes, Outlook, and Google. Jack Vinson created the wiki here (feel free to fill in the cells if you have a PBWiki account):
{ Link }
- 5
Keith Brooks http://www.vanessabrooks.com | 6/14/2009 8:16:07 PM
Inbox analytics could be interesting but figure thats a 3rd party option usually.
Token system sounds just annoying, but then how does it work for Blackberries?
Scheduled delivery is probably the most common request.
- 6
Harris Huckabee | 6/15/2009 4:17:21 PM
Make the Notes client be not just an SMTP client but also a Wave client. Maybe there will be a day when a multitude of strange and wonderful creatures will swim together in my Inbox, whose main commonalities are a subject and recipients/workflow actors and creators? Email is here to stay, but the ability to contain all these creatures in a single Inbox would be golden. An opportunity for Lotus to capitalize on its flexibility and open-source direction. It would also address some of your email proliferation points, Craig, by giving users choice of message type/protocol.
- 7
Eric Souza | 6/16/2009 12:29:42 PM
The incessant self-spamming due to lengthy disclaimers and out-of-control signature requirements is where I'd rather start trying to shed light on email overload. If actual content didn't require you to wade through as much out-of-context material just to discern the nature of the request/message, it would be a godsend.
But this is likely the "no cure" part of email, esp. since requirements for disclaimers and signatures just get more intricate over time, not less.
- 8
Paul Robichaux http://www.robichaux.net/blog | 6/24/2009 8:11:14 AM
I wrote up some notes on how Outlook and Exchange implement Craig's wish list at { Link }
I'd be just as curious to see how many of these Outlook can/cannot do.