Are YOU a Cyber Pack-Rat?
From today's NYT:
July 5, 2001
You've Got Maelstrom: Dealing With Too Much
E-Mail
By ROBERT STRAUSS
ed Horovitz considers himself a fairly
spare and organized person. At Video
Pipeline, the New Jersey-based video
promotion company of which he is president,
he keeps a clean desktop, both real and
virtual.
"I couldn't work with clutter on my desk," he
said. "And on my computer, I have only five
icons, where my employees have like 50. I'm
no pack rat, here or at home."
But then there is his e-mail in-box.
"All right, so I have 2,465 messages in there,"
Mr. Horovitz admitted. And none of them are
going into neat little folders on his Microsoft
Outlook program any time soon, either. "I
know you can put these things in files and
have them organized, but it never seems
worth the trouble," he said.
As e-mail has taken over both work and
personal communications, there are more and
more electronic shards out there for people to
agonize over, asking themselves: Should I
ditch? Should I keep? And what virtual pile
should I put it in?
Paradoxically, e-mail pileup may be less of an
issue on a home computer or in a small office
than on what may seem like a vastly larger
corporate server, where it can bog down
other network tasks. With hard drives now
measured in gigabytes, home computers are
all the more forgiving of those who just can't
bring themselves to hit Delete. And with
e-mail, as with a desk, clutter and chaos may
yield its own sort of filing system if you know
where to look.
Michael Capuzzo, whose new book, "Close
to Shore" (Broadway Books), is about shark
attacks off the New Jersey shore in 1916,
says that his own efforts to organize his e-mail
succeeded only in crashing his computer.
"Now," he said, "I'm the ultimate cyber pack
rat. I keep every e-mail, just in case." If he wants to find something, he just
alphabetizes his subject or sender and then leafs through the mail.
"I don't know how much room there is in my in-box," Mr. Capuzzo said, "but I
guess I'll eventually find out."
Clearly this is not how e-mail was intended to work. It seemed the answer to the
problems of those semi-organized people who wrote down phone numbers on this
scrap or that and had paper flowing every which way, streaming from desk to floor
to file cabinet to (almost never) trash can.
Microsoft, which produces the ubiquitous Outlook e-mail system, and Qualcomm,
which distributes the popular program Eudora, have continually refined the
possibilities for creating subject folders, for setting up filters that automatically sort
incoming mail into those folders (or into Trash, if desired) and for locating individual
messages and text within them.
"Software has become pretty customizable at this point," said Stephen Jacobs,
assistant professor of information technology at the Rochester Institute of
Technology. "So that is good for people putting in the effort to customize."
But Ned Kock, director of what is known as the e-collaboration center at the Fox
School of Business and Management at Temple University, said that there was an
almost inherent disincentive to using folders and filters.
"In using e-mail, you have six main tasks," he said. "You open the system. You
download the messages. You read the messages. You reply. You file them. You
shut off the system."
"We as a species are optimized for face- to-face communication, so only two of
these — the reading and replying — are vaguely associated with that," Mr. Kock
said. "The others are just overhead. They carry no social interest at all."
"There is an excitement to reading and replying, but filing takes cognitive effort
without an immediate reward," he explained. "So despite its being important in the
long run to be organized, it is human nature to avoid it."
So it may take a special kind of person to take advantage of those custom features.
"Most people," Mr. Jacobs said, "just decide that there are too many other things
more important and less confusing."
Mr. Jacobs admits that even though he is an information technology expert himself,
he has carried his messy-desk habits over to e-mail and rarely uses filters and
folders, though he does delete a lot of clearly transitory items as as they come in.
Some don't even manage that, for example, Lisa Moss, who runs Euro-Pacific Film
and Video Productions in Tinton Falls, N.J., with her husband, Dave. "I have stuff
going back for years," she admitted. "I just don't take the time, although I do admit
when that rare, rare moment comes and I weed and do delete, it feels good. I'm the
same with voice mails. I never delete them until the phone won't take anymore. And
at home, I want to get that clean, organized feeling, but I always seem to be
attacking piles of stuff there too."
But that isn't how it should be, experts say, as the electronic age speeds people
along.
"The problem is that now, with e-mail and the Internet, you can accumulate so much
more so quickly," said Catherine M. Beise, an associate professor of computer
information systems at Florida Gulf Coast University in Fort Myers. "If you are
going to be productive these days, you have to get organized because of the speed
of everything." Ms. Beise had her own e-mail nightmare when she moved to Florida
from her teaching job in Atlanta.
"When I moved my office, the problem was that my old e-mail system was
incompatible with my new one," she said. "I ended up abandoning stuff in folders in
hopes I didn't need it after I moved." She said the experience was "very painful."
Sometimes the e-mail filing issue causes family conflict, admittedly of a small sort,
when the technologically savvy member gets exasperated with the Luddite.
"My husband, the consummate computer geek who organizes his entire virtual life,
doesn't get how I can let my e-mail continue to build up with no sense of purpose or
structure," said Molly Cronlund, a student and mother of three in Abington, Pa.
And some users find little worth saving. Gary Popowcer, for example, a financial
administrator at the Vanguard Group of mutual funds, is prepared to travel light.
"Basically, I delete everything," he said, with an exception: "I just keep jokes in a
joke folder in case I may need it someday. Which means I delete most everything."
That would suit many network administrators who preside over corporate e-mail
systems. WellPoint Health Networks, a California-based health insurer with more
than 13,000 employees, deals with the e-mail problem by automatically deleting
messages within 30 days if they are not actively saved and placed in a folder by the
recipient.
"It's not that any individual e-mail would crash the system," said a spokesman for
WellPoint, Ken Ferber. "But with this many employees working simultaneously, it's
like your little snowball could become an avalanche if everyone stresses the server at
the same time." He added that his company had never faced that kind of crisis.
"The byproduct of all this is that it has become a great time-management tool," Mr.
Ferber said. "It's forced us to act on e- mail immediately and put the important ones
in folders. I used to look at some minor request and say, `Oh, I ll get around to that.'
Now, I act on everything right away, and you'd be surprised how things get done
more efficiently."
But while few doubt that getting more organized with e-mail would benefit them at
least slightly, it may be low on the priority list.
"I'm one of those who always know better but don't do anything," said Mr. Jacobs,
the Rochester professor. `So I say, `By jingo, I will filter that e-mail some day.' Or
whatever the best thing should be."
"Of course," he added with a sigh, "I have Hilton Hotel expenses from a conference
in January here on my desk to file with the university, so that e-mail filtering may be
delayed a little bit." |
