A Tale of Two Emailers
A Peek at Two Colleagues' Email Methods
Reveals Different Ways of Tackling the Tide
January 30, 2006
Can email, that humblest of programs, be a window into the soul?
I'm not talking about people's intimate correspondence that you happen to shoulder-surf. Rather, I'm interested in how we manage our email programs, and how we push and pull them into rough approximations of how we like to organize the world.
We think of a program such as the ubiquitous Microsoft Outlook as a rigid thing, full of commands that we learn and rules that we have to abide by. But sitting down with two of my colleagues last week, I was struck by how differently people in the same office could use one piece of software -- at times, Outlook hardly seemed like the same program.
Lex and Katherine are both skilled editors and known in the office as well-organized, reliable folks. But in Outlook Land they're barely the same species. The first clue to how different they are? Their main inbox. You can tell a lot about how a person approaches the world by looking at his or her Outlook status bar, which dispassionately informs you how many items are in the current inbox and how many of those are unread. Last week when I came to visit, the status bar for Lex's main inbox said: 11,841 items, 2,199 unread. Katherine's? 10 items, 4 unread -- and while I was sitting with her, she quickly and matter-of-factly dealt with those four.
So Lex is careless about her email and owes a lot of people messages, right? Wrong. OK, Katherine hardly ever gets email, right? Wrong. From an outside perspective, their responsibilities and workload aren't enormously different. But they're practically matter and antimatter in terms of how they deal with the ceaseless tide of email and the tasks it brings in.
Those 11,000+ items in Lex's inbox go back to last June; older emails are archived on her hard drive, a domain she estimates contains 100,000 emails. (One hard-drive subfolder we peeked in contained around 28,000 items.) Lex says she gets more than 100 emails a day, deletes about half of them, and cleans out her Deleted Items folder nightly. About once a week she bumps up against the corporate-mandated size limit on her email box and has to do an emergency clear to avoid losing email capabilities. (Lex's email allowance is 100 Megabytes, larger than the norm for our office but still faintly ridiculous in this age of free email programs offering multiple gigabytes of storage.) When she has to clear space, she does so by taking a chunk off the bottom of her inbox and shoving it into a personal folder. On the weekend, when Outlook automatically moves old messages to Deleted Items, she checks up on what the system is trying to delete -- and most of the time puts those things back. As for messages with big attachments
