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Understanding email use: predicting action on a message

Published:02 April 2005Publication History

ABSTRACT

Email consumes significant time and attention in the workplace. We conducted an organizational survey to understand how and why people attend to incoming email messages. We examined people's ratings of message importance and the actions they took on specific email messages, based on message characteristics and characteristics of receivers and senders. Respondents kept half of their new messages in the inbox and replied to about a third of them. They rated messages as important if they were about work and required action. Importance, in turn, had a modest impact on whether people replied to their incoming messages and whether they saved them. The results indicate that factors other than message importance (e.g., their social nature) also determine how people handle email. Overall, email usage reflects attentional differences due both to personal propensities and to work demands and relationships.

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            cover image ACM Conferences
            CHI '05: Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
            April 2005
            928 pages
            ISBN:1581139985
            DOI:10.1145/1054972

            Copyright © 2005 ACM

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            • Published: 2 April 2005

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