Research-based approaches to email & time management

Dr. Brad MehlenbacherLeadership, Policy &Adult & Higher EducationNC State Universitybrad_m@unity.ncsu.edu www4.ncsu.edu/~brad_m

Higher education culture & rapid change

Asaolu, O. S. (2006). On the emergence of new computer technologies. Educational Technology and Society, 9(1), 335–343.Hanna, D. E. (2003). Organizational models in higher education, past and future. In M. G. Moore & W. G. Anderson (Eds.), Handbook of Distance Education (pp. 67-78). Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.

Adopted from:

Work is information-intensive, customized, rapid, flexible, horizontal, integrated, service oriented, distributed, continuous, consultative (Asaolu, 2005, p. 337)

“Access to education from any location, at any time, for any age, and in many ways is critical for individual and collective well-being” (Hanna, 2003, p. 68)

Collegial Managerial Entrepreneurial Orientation to change Leadership Values Decision-making

• Conservers • Stewardship • Faculty program • Restricted, shared

internal

• Pragmatists • Preservation • Ad ministrative

effici ency • Vertical, top-down

• Originators • V isionary • Client-oriented • Horizontal, shared with

stakeholders Support structures Key messages Communication strategies

• Program-driven • Qual ity • Internal

• Rule-focused • Efficiency • Vertical, formal

• Learner-focused • Market-driven • E xternal/internal,

horizontal, informal Systems and resources Key messages Alliances

• Dup licated according to need

• Stick together • Value no t easily

recognized

• Stable, efficient, and pre-organized

• Don’t rock the boat • Unnecessary

• Ev olving “as needed” • Seize the day • Sought out and

implemented Organizational features • Specialized • Segmented and vertical • Integrated and cross-

functional Budgets Actions New programs

• Stable, priority programs

• Ev olutionary • Complement existing

programs

• Tightly controlled • Targeted • Fit existing structures

• Fluid, opportunity seeking

• Revolutionary • Make new markets or

force new structures Competition • Avoi d competition • Minimize competition

through regulation • Ex ploit competitive

advantage Strategies • Improve quality • Improve efficiency • E stablish new market

“niches” Faculty and staff values • Independence • Author ity and

predictability • Collaboration

Rewards • Indi vidual • Functional • Organizational

Managing multiple work-learning worlds

Gleick, J. (1999). Faster: The acceleration of just about everything. NY, NY: Pantheon Books.Ong, W. J. (1982). Orality and literacy: The technologizing of the word. NY, NY: Methuen, pp. 82-83.

Adopted from:

Phase Transition: “The controlling factor here is not heat or energy but pure connectivity”

“Night now, Daddy, you go ‘puter email” (Eleanor, 2 years old)

“But where’s my email?!” (Frances, 4 years old)

Work Learning Leisure Learning

Higher Learning

“Alienation from a natural milieu can be good for us and indeed is in many ways essential for full human life. To live and to understand fully, we need not only proximity but also distance…. Technologies are artificial, but — paradox again — artificiality is natural to human beings. Technology, properly interiorized, does not degrade human life but on the contrary enhances it”

E-mail is pervasive & ubiquitous Email “has evolved beyond a

passive communication system” (MacKay, 1989, p. 395)

Email “is woven into the general system of coordinated activity” (Wattenberg, 2005, p. 144)

74% of American adults use Internet; 69% online daily

91% of them use e-mail 71% of workers regard email as

“essential” for their everyday work (Whittaker, 2005, p. 49).

MacKay, W. E. (1989). Diversity in the use of electronic mail: A preliminary inquiry. ACM Transactions on Office Information Systems, 6 (4), 380-397.PEW Internet & American Project. (2009). Online Activities and Internet: The mainstreaming of online life. Available online: http://www.pewinternet.orgWattenberg, M., Rohall, S. L., Gruen, D., & Kerr, B. (2005). Email research: Targeting the enterprise. Human-Computer Interaction, 20 (1/2), 139-162. Whittaker, S. (2005). Supporting collaborative task management in email. Human-Computer Interaction, 20 (1/2), 49-88.

Adopted from:

Knowledge workers average checking email 50 times/day, instant messaging 77 times, and visited over 40 websites

Email volume has doubled over last 5 years, to 40B person-to-person emails everyday (IBM Podcast, 2008)

Balancing proximity & distance

Contemporary conditions include fragmentation, diminished attention, interruptability, multitasking, dual processing, polychronicity, information overload, pseudo-attention deficit disorder (Lohr, 2007)

“Employees are said to spend about 50 to 90 minutes a day managing email” (Van Waes, 2003, p. 279).

How do I balance work with personal time, research, instruction, and extension, access with protected time, community interests with individual priorities, service goals with self?

Brown, J. S., & Duguid, P. (2000). The social life of information. Boston, MA: Harvard Business School P.Lohr, S. (2007). Is information overload a $650 billion drag on the economy? New York Times, December 20. Available online: http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2007/12/20/is-information -overload-a-650-billion-drag-on-the-economy/?scp=1andsq=information+overloadVan Waes, L. (2003). Use and misuse of email. Document Design, 4 (3), 279-280.

Adopted from:

Characterizing your e-mail use How many messages did you

send today? How many messages did you

receive today? Is this a typical day? How many mail folders do you

have? How many messages are in

your inbox? Is this typical? How many distribution lists do

you subscribe to? How often do you read your

email? Do you read all of your email?

MacKay, W. E. (1989). Diversity in the use of electronic mail: A preliminary inquiry. ACM Transactions on Office Information Systems, 6 (4), 380-397.Whittaker, S. (2005). Supporting collaborative task management in email. Human-Computer Interaction, 20 (1/2), 49-88.

Adopted from:

What percentage of messages do you wish you had never seen? (MacKay, 1989, p. 396)

Do you keep reminders? Do you keep an

electronic or hardcopy calendar?

Do you keep a separate to-do list(s)?

Can you identify messages related to most important work tasks? (Whittaker, 2005).

Making email your refrigerator

Require electricity, textual literacy, computer knowledge

Allow strangers and spammers to post messages

Invite hasty responses, accidental postings, flames

Make co-authoring a note difficult Organize themselves

chronologically Hide the contents of new notes Isolate communication exchange

and incidental viewing Last forever and get re-circulated

out of context.

PEW Internet & American Project. (2005). Online Activities and Internet: The mainstreaming of online life. Available online: http://www.pewinternet.org

Adopted from:

My refrigerator notes don’t:

Anticipating the email future

Bellotti, V., Ducheneaut, N., Howard, M., Smith, I., & Grinter, R. E. (2005). Quality versus quantity: Email-centric task management and its relation with overload. Human-Computer Interaction, 20 (1/2), 89-138.Human-Computer Interaction Lab, University of Maryland. Available online: http://www.cs.umd.edu/hcil/pubs/screenshots/Role-manager.shtml Gwizdka, J. (2002). Reinventing the inbox — Supporting the management of pending tasks in e-mail. Proceedings of CHI 2002 Conference, Minneapolis, MN, 550-551.

Adopted from:

Sample analysis of e-mail threads (p. 111):

Visualization role-manager interface (HCIL):

Task view inbox as calendar (p. 551):

Understanding the limitations of email

Blandford, A. E., & Green, T. R. G. (2001). Group and individual time management tools: What you get is not what you need. Personal and Ubiquitous Computing, 5 (4), 213-230.Ducheneaut, N., & Watts, L. A. (2005). In search of coherence: A review of email research. Human-Computer Interaction, 20 (1/2), 11-48.

Adopted from:

Reminders of appointments and to-dos

Other time-based information

Group uses A record of past activities Portability Ready accessibility Visual salience in the work

setting Fluidity of visual structure Local versus global view Scarring

Problems: Prioritizing intentions Expressiveness of

technologies Explicit and implicit

information Event series Typographic Not face-to-face

communication

“E-mail is an evolving sociotechnical phenomenon” (Ducheneaut & Watts, 2005, p. 12)

Working with email strategically Identify essential information Produce accurate, brief, clear

messages Consider alternative media Keep relevant content at hand Preserve the ongoing work-state

of incomplete activities Save content that might be

needed again in the future Find things in the overwhelming

and generally growing mass of content

Prioritize the “must-do’s” against the “would-be-nice-to-do’s”

Get rid of irrelevant content (Bellotti, et al. (2005, p. 101).

Bellotti, V., Ducheneaut, N., Howard, M., Smith, I., & Grinter, R. E. (2005). Quality versus quantity: Email-centric task management and its relation with overload. Human-Computer Interaction, 20 (1/2), 89-138.

Adopted from:

Minimize copying (consider audience, purpose, goals)

Organize according to priorities: from direct report, messages to you, to you and others, and copied to you

Streamline workflow.

Employing simple email tactics

Regularly scanning the inbox; often scrolling up and down Turning off ping; avoiding dependence on constant email updates Learning keystroke shortcuts and exploring your email application Sorting, by sender, flags, other prioritizing systems, to find items

more easily than in the default time-and-date-based view Deleting items to clean-out irrelevant, distracting content in the inbox Storing currently relevant items in task application Marking email messages as unread (or critical or important, etc.) Storing items in appropriately labeled email folders and subfolders to

be worked on together in the future Archiving messages in email folders for reference Inspecting or searching in folders in email and using other technical

or nontechnical methods of keeping work prioritized Making a calendar event to remind oneself to do something (Bellotti,

et al., 2005, p. 102).

Bellotti, V., Ducheneaut, N., Howard, M., Smith, I., & Grinter, R. E. (2005). Quality versus quantity: Email-centric task management and its relation with overload. Human-Computer Interaction, 20 (1/2), 89-138.

Adopted from:

Remembering netoric, not netiquette

Albion.com, & Ross, S. T. (2004). Netiquette. Available online: http://www.albion.com/netiquette/book/index.htmlLanham, R. A. (2002). The audit of virtuality: Universities in the attention economy. In S. Brint (Ed.), The future of the city of intellect: The changing American university (pp. 159-180). Stanford, CA: Stanford UP.

Adopted from:

Remember the human, that is, your audience, their time constraints, work patterns, communication styles, organizational habits

Set high-level priorities for your work and personal life

Adhere to the same standards of behavior online that you follow in real life

Know where you are in cyberspace and for how long and what purposes

Respect other people’s time and bandwidth

Make yourself look good online Share expert knowledge Help keep flame wars under control

(reflect) Respect other people’s privacy Don’t abuse your power Be forgiving of other people’s mistakes

“The digital medium is not a neutral conduit any more than print was…. The rhetoric of digital expression is already in use across academic life, at least in embryo, and its implications are clear enough and profound” (pp. 175-176)

Internalizing netoric

Felder, R. M. (2006). A whole new mind for a flat world. Chemical Engineering Education, 40(2), 96–97.Putnam, R. D. (2000). Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community. New York: Simon and Schuster.

Adopted from:

Knowledge work is creative, entrepreneurial, holistic, multidisciplinary, global, interpersonal, relational, self-directed, and flexible (Felder, 2006, p. 96)

“The proportion of us who say we ‘always feel rushed’ jumped by more than half between the mid-1960s and the mid-1990s” (Putnam, 2000, p. 189)