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Accourding to a survey by a British university, 34% of people surveyed said they were stressed by e-mail.
35% check e-mail more than 20 times a day, and some check more that 40 times per hour!
An e-mail is read 4-8 times before being processed!
How many e-mails do you have in your inbox at any given time, read or unread?
What is the main reason for them still being in your inbox?
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Peter,
A common factoid is that many electronic processes are still well vetted in good old fashion paper processes. Junk mail for example; it didn't start with e-mail SPAM, it started in Snail Mail. We get it still everyday like clock-work (like e-mail SPAM), especially this time of year, via holiday catalogs.
Now, I bet if you sort and toss out your junk mail as soon as you pick it up from your Snail Mail mailbox, you more than likely clean out and maintain your electronic Inbox in the same manner.
In deploying “many” of today's systems (e-mail is just one of the guilty), a "blank slate" thought process was never really employed. All that was done was a mimicing of how people use traditional communication delivery mechanisms, as a matter-of-fact it dates back to the Pony Express!
So all of the ills of the manual processes crept into the electronic processes, except exasperated because of the velocity which is the internet.
We have similar problems across a wide spectrum of systems and technologies. To many thing were done without thinking about "what's next".
That’s why the Inbox remains a problem, the same reason why households have a stack of catalogs, junk and old mail sitting in various piles in their offices and homes.
New thinking is required. Twitter is just one of many “embryonic” examples of new thought processes in how we communicate electronically.
Good Luck,
Peter
January 2009
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