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Email overload at work: an analysis of factors associated with email strain

Published: 04 November 2006 Publication History

Abstract

Almost every office worker can relate to feelings of email overload and stress, but in reality the concept of email strain is not well understood. In this paper, we describe a large-scale nationwide organizational survey examining the relationship between email use and feelings of email overload and task coordination. We found that higher email volume was associated with increased feelings of email overload, but this relationship was moderated by certain email management strategies. The contribution to the field of CSCW is a better understanding of the concept of email related stress, and initial scale development for the assessment of email-related overload and perceptions of the work-importance of email.

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cover image ACM Conferences
CSCW '06: Proceedings of the 2006 20th anniversary conference on Computer supported cooperative work
November 2006
548 pages
ISBN:1595932496
DOI:10.1145/1180875
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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Published: 04 November 2006

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Author Tags

  1. computer-mediated communication
  2. coordination
  3. e-mail
  4. electronic mail
  5. email
  6. overload
  7. strain
  8. stress

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CSCW06
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CSCW06: Computer Supported Cooperative Work
November 4 - 8, 2006
Alberta, Banff, Canada

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  • (2024)Supporting Organizations in Improving Employee Bulk E-mail --- A Tool Design and Evaluation StudyProceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction10.1145/36869118:CSCW2(1-28)Online publication date: 8-Nov-2024
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