Email Overload had originally (that is, in the mid-1990s when the problem erupted) involved the existence of too much incoming mail. There were just too many messages arriving in the Inbox and needing to be processed. The metaphor I liked to use was of snowfall: the flakes keep coming down, and unless you shovel the accumulated layer away your driveway will be buried. What you had to do was set times to do the shoveling, and learn to do it faster.
But today the snow metaphor is giving way to something much less serene and more sinister, perhaps akin to Hitchcock’s birds. The messages no longer come in passively and lie contented in the Inbox until you’re ready to shovel… they are active and violent, clamoring for your attention, ready to claw at you if you don’t react to them RIGHT NOW! Try and ignore a message for a few hours and the sender will be all over you on your cellphone: haven’t you seen my email?? How dare you not look for it!
This change involves a newer element of Information Overload: the expectation of 24×7 availability and immediate response. I suspect that this is a result of the “Blackberry culture”, which speeded up the pace of doing business, did away with the excuse that “I was away from my computer”, and of course enabled the sender of an email to grab you by a cellular call to complain that you haven’t yet responded to the message they emailed you five minutes ago.
The extent to which this weirdness has infiltrated the email ethic was illustrated vividly when a friend who is an artist tried to apply my teaching of setting a daily time slot for email processing. She set hers after lunch, and was immediately rewarded by angry calls from her correspondents complaining that their morning mail had to wait a few hours. And this is in the art world, not a hospital intensive care unit. Never mind that there is no real need; the expectation of immediacy is pervasive. I was recently treated to a resend of a meeting request for a few weeks in the future, three hours after it came in originally. The admin only wrote in the resend “???” – as if this brief delay was inexplicable and inexcusable.
It seems that the incoming overload is fighting against our efforts to put it in control. Scary!
Nathan,
The stories you are telling illustrate cases of mistaken expectations from email. Email arrive in seconds, and will be seen in … whenever the recipient sees it. The _senders_ were misusing the medium.
Perhaps everyone should be taught the features and reasonable expectations associated with each medium: snail mail, email, chat, SMS, land-line phone, cell phone, telepathy, and so on. In order to teach every one a good place to start is school. Teach how to use each medium, and when to choose each medium.
Indeed, Boaz, the senders were certainly misusing the medium, or rather, using it right (to send the information) but expecting the recipient to “misuse” it by monitoring and servicing it on a real time basis.
OTOH, if the recipients were to put their foot down and refuse to play along, the senders might be forced to adjust… yet I find, working with knowledge-based organizations, that the recipients seldom do.