Marta E. Cecchinato, Jon Bird, & Anna L. Cox
The stress resulting from the daily demands of email exchange and management has been labelled email overload. The extent to which individuals are affected by email overload has much to do with personal, cultural, and contextual differences. However, in general people are inefficient at dealing with email and could potentially reduce the stress associated with it if they changed their behaviour. In this paper, we review some of the strategies offered in the literature, as well as some email tools that have been developed to help people manage their inboxes. We point out the benefits and disadvantages of them, suggesting that adaptive approaches might be more effective at facilitating email behaviour changes than fixed one-size-fits-all solutions. We argue that the adaptation should be the result of personalisation (controlled by the system) and customisation (controlled by the user) because these processes support behaviour change in different ways.
The stress resulting from the daily demands of email exchange and management has been labelled email overload. The extent to which individuals are affected by email overload has much to do with personal, cultural, and contextual differences. However, in general people are inefficient at dealing with email and could potentially reduce the stress associated with it if they changed their behaviour. In this paper, we review some of the strategies offered in the literature, as well as some email tools that have been developed to help people manage their inboxes. We point out the benefits and disadvantages of them, suggesting that adaptive approaches might be more effective at facilitating email behaviour changes than fixed one-size-fits-all solutions. We argue that the adaptation should be the result of personalisation (controlled by the system) and customisation (controlled by the user) because these processes support behaviour change in different ways.