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Managers' email: beyond tasks and to-dos

Published: 02 April 2005 Publication History

Abstract

In this paper, we describe preliminary findings that indicate that managers and non-mangers think about their email differently. We asked three research managers and three research non-managers to sort about 250 of their own email messages into categories that "would help them to manage their work." Our analyses indicate that managers create more categories and a more differentiated category structure than non-managers. Our data also suggest that managers create "relationship-oriented" categories more often than non-managers. These results are relevant to research on "email overload" that has highlighted the use of email for activities beyond communication. In particular, our findings suggest that too strong a focus on task management may be incomplete, and that a user's organizational role has an impact on their conceptualization and likely use of email.

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Dredze, M., Stylos, J., Lau, T., Kellogg, W., Danis, C., and Kushmerick, N. TAXIE: Automatically Identifying Tasks in Email. Manuscript available from the authors.
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Mintzberg, H. The Nature of Managerial Work. Harper and Row, New York, 1973.
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Cited By

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  • (2015)Building a Better World with our Information: The Future of Personal Information Management, Part 3Synthesis Lectures on Information Concepts, Retrieval, and Services10.2200/S00653ED1V01Y201506ICR0427:4(1-203)Online publication date: 25-Aug-2015
  • (2012)Email pragmatics and automatic classification: A study in the organizational contextJournal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology10.1002/asi.2170263:5(904-922)Online publication date: 1-May-2012
  • (2009)Males' and Females' Script Debugging StrategiesProceedings of the 2nd International Symposium on End-User Development - Volume 543510.5555/3093119.3093133(205-224)Online publication date: 2-Mar-2009
  • Show More Cited By

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cover image ACM Conferences
CHI EA '05: CHI '05 Extended Abstracts on Human Factors in Computing Systems
April 2005
1358 pages
ISBN:1595930027
DOI:10.1145/1056808
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Association for Computing Machinery

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Publication History

Published: 02 April 2005

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  1. managers
  2. relationship
  3. task and contact management

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Cited By

View all
  • (2015)Building a Better World with our Information: The Future of Personal Information Management, Part 3Synthesis Lectures on Information Concepts, Retrieval, and Services10.2200/S00653ED1V01Y201506ICR0427:4(1-203)Online publication date: 25-Aug-2015
  • (2012)Email pragmatics and automatic classification: A study in the organizational contextJournal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology10.1002/asi.2170263:5(904-922)Online publication date: 1-May-2012
  • (2009)Males' and Females' Script Debugging StrategiesProceedings of the 2nd International Symposium on End-User Development - Volume 543510.5555/3093119.3093133(205-224)Online publication date: 2-Mar-2009
  • (2009)Males’ and Females’ Script Debugging StrategiesEnd-User Development10.1007/978-3-642-00427-8_12(205-224)Online publication date: 2009
  • (2009)Detecting the MinimalMinimalism10.1007/978-1-84882-371-6_6(125-237)Online publication date: 10-Mar-2009

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