Email Processing and Triage Basics
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Email Processing and triage: The process of assessing each new message you receive and deciding when and how to handle it.
Email users often struggle with the complexities of needing to review, analyze, prioritize, respond to, organize, and file the large volume of incoming messages they receive.
This is done through Email triage, the process of assessing each new message and deciding when and how to handle it, which is perhaps one of the most challenging, and frustrating, aspects of Email and a common cause of Email overload.
Email processing and triage contains many cognitively difficult tasks and is further restricted by the often limited capabilities of the Email system itself.
Areas of specific difficulty in performing Email processing and triage include how to:
- Prioritize
- Organize
- Classify
- Group
- Arrange
- Inter-relate
…..all of the Email messages presented in the inbox.
When a new Email message arrives, you must determine whether to handle it right away, defer it for later, or ignore it entirely, all based on the immediately visible message information such as subject, sender, and priority.
In addition, making the process even more complex, you must analyze each new message and compare it against all the messages that already reside in your inbox. You must analyze new messages and compare them against what already exists in your inbox, determining what is truly "new" as compared to a message that is either a follow-up or a response to a prior message already in your inbox
But, as we will see, there are specific email processing approaches that can be employed in order to make you a more productive and proficient Email practitioner.
In addition, we will also review modifications and enhancements that you can make to your Email inbox that can also result in some significant improvements in your ability to triage your Email.
Stay tuned for future posts on Email processing and triage, where we will review some of these helpful techniques in detail.
References:
Neustaedter, C., Brush, A.J., & Smith, M. (2005). Beyond "from" and "received": Exploring the dynamics of email triage. In Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI) '05 (pp. 1977–1980). New York, NY: ACM Press.
Whittaker, S., Bellotti, V., & Gwizdka, J. (2006). Email in personal information management. Communications of the ACM, 49(1), 68-73.
Whittaker, S., Bellotti, V., & Gwizdka, J. (2007). Everything through email. In W. Jones and J. Teevan (Eds.) Personal Information Management (pp. 167-189). London: University of Washington Press
Whittaker, S., & Sidner, C. (1996). Email overload: Exploring personal information management of email. In S. Kiesler, S. Kiesler (Eds.), Culture of the Internet (pp. 277-295). Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates Publishers.
Fisher, D., Brush, A., Gleave. E., & Smith, M. (2006). Revisiting Whittaker & Sidner's email overload ten years later. In Proceedings of the 2006 20th anniversary conference on computer supported cooperative work (pp. 431-440). New York, NY: ACM Press.
Tyler, J., & Tang, J. (2003). When can I expect an email response? A study of rhythms in email usage. In Proceedings of the 8th European Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work (pp. 239-258). Norwell, MA: Kluwer Academic Publishers.
Venolia, G., Dabbish, L., Cadiz, J., & Gupta, A. (2001). Supporting email workflow (MSR-TR-2001-88). Microsoft Research.
Wainer, J., Dabbish, L., & Kraut, R. (2011). Should I open this email? Inbox-level cues, curiosity and attention to email. In Proceedings of the 2011 annual conference on human factors in computing systems (CHI '11) (pp. 3439-3448).
Szóstek, A. (2011). Dealing with my emails: Latent user needs in email management. Computers in Human Behavior, 27(2), 723-729.
