Tag Archives: Email

Email Overload

13 Monday Apr 2015

Posted by in Productivity, Social Media, Tools

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stampsHaving just had a few days off I have come back to the usual full mailbox and a quota that’s blown so need to clear items out before I can send anything.

This is a very common place occurrence for people now, but how do we actually behave with and use email?

A recent study “Evolution of Conversations in the Age of Email Overload” carried out by Yahoo and Cornell University studied more than 2 million users exchanging 16 billion emails over several months.

The study itself shows some interesting results, but is based between pairs of people who send more than 5 replies to each other and have opted in to surveys which provides a level of bias into the survey.

Youngest email users, teens, have the fastest reply times; as users get older they become slower to reply to emails.

Email

The survey provides details on the response times (medians of results)

  • 13 minutes for Teens
  • 16 minutes for Young Adults (20–35 years old)
  • 24 minutes for Adults (36–50 years old)
  • 47 minutes for Mature users (51 and older)

These figures for me show how the Younger Generations are more reliant on technology and interact with social media at a more frequent rate than their peers. It would be interesting to see the results on a wider distribution of users and email interactions though and if that has a skew on the results, also what device the users have access to which may dictate the speed of the reply.

Source : http://arxiv.org/abs/1504.00704

#YourActionBob! – Hashtags in Emails

12 Thursday Feb 2015

Posted by in Productivity, Social Media

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hashtag

Hashtags, either love them or hate them, but they are here for the long term and they are spreading.

Recently I have started to receive a number of emails (from different people) using the Hashtags for things such as #Max to indicate the bit that I need to read in the email when its gone to multiple recipients or #Action for the things I need to do.

Typically I have always received emails with the words Max or Action in them, but the addition of the # is more recent. It certainly makes the words on the page noticed a bit more as its a character my eyes are not normally used to seeing.

There is certainly an ever decreasing line between social media and work communication etiquette.

Maybe its time to update the definition to include emails.

hashtag
ˈhaʃtaɡ/
noun
a word or phrase preceded by a hash sign (#), used on social media sites such as Twitter to identify messages on a specific topic.

-Google-

(PS. If anyone called Bob is reading this its not really your action)