Post on 25-Feb-2016
description
Research-based approaches to email & time management
Dr. Brad MehlenbacherLeadership, Policy &Adult & Higher EducationNC State Universitybrad_m@unity.ncsu.edu www4.ncsu.edu/~brad_m
Higher education culture & rapid change
Asaolu, O. S. (2006). On the emergence of new computer technologies. Educational Technology and Society, 9(1), 335–343.Hanna, D. E. (2003). Organizational models in higher education, past and future. In M. G. Moore & W. G. Anderson (Eds.), Handbook of Distance Education (pp. 67-78). Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.
Adopted from:
Work is information-intensive, customized, rapid, flexible, horizontal, integrated, service oriented, distributed, continuous, consultative (Asaolu, 2005, p. 337)
“Access to education from any location, at any time, for any age, and in many ways is critical for individual and collective well-being” (Hanna, 2003, p. 68)
Collegial Managerial Entrepreneurial Orientation to change Leadership Values Decision-making
• Conservers • Stewardship • Faculty program • Restricted, shared
internal
• Pragmatists • Preservation • Ad ministrative
effici ency • Vertical, top-down
• Originators • V isionary • Client-oriented • Horizontal, shared with
stakeholders Support structures Key messages Communication strategies
• Program-driven • Qual ity • Internal
• Rule-focused • Efficiency • Vertical, formal
• Learner-focused • Market-driven • E xternal/internal,
horizontal, informal Systems and resources Key messages Alliances
• Dup licated according to need
• Stick together • Value no t easily
recognized
• Stable, efficient, and pre-organized
• Don’t rock the boat • Unnecessary
• Ev olving “as needed” • Seize the day • Sought out and
implemented Organizational features • Specialized • Segmented and vertical • Integrated and cross-
functional Budgets Actions New programs
• Stable, priority programs
• Ev olutionary • Complement existing
programs
• Tightly controlled • Targeted • Fit existing structures
• Fluid, opportunity seeking
• Revolutionary • Make new markets or
force new structures Competition • Avoi d competition • Minimize competition
through regulation • Ex ploit competitive
advantage Strategies • Improve quality • Improve efficiency • E stablish new market
“niches” Faculty and staff values • Independence • Author ity and
predictability • Collaboration
Rewards • Indi vidual • Functional • Organizational
Managing multiple work-learning worlds
Gleick, J. (1999). Faster: The acceleration of just about everything. NY, NY: Pantheon Books.Ong, W. J. (1982). Orality and literacy: The technologizing of the word. NY, NY: Methuen, pp. 82-83.
Adopted from:
Phase Transition: “The controlling factor here is not heat or energy but pure connectivity”
“Night now, Daddy, you go ‘puter email” (Eleanor, 2 years old)
“But where’s my email?!” (Frances, 4 years old)
Work Learning Leisure Learning
Higher Learning
“Alienation from a natural milieu can be good for us and indeed is in many ways essential for full human life. To live and to understand fully, we need not only proximity but also distance…. Technologies are artificial, but — paradox again — artificiality is natural to human beings. Technology, properly interiorized, does not degrade human life but on the contrary enhances it”
E-mail is pervasive & ubiquitous Email “has evolved beyond a
passive communication system” (MacKay, 1989, p. 395)
Email “is woven into the general system of coordinated activity” (Wattenberg, 2005, p. 144)
74% of American adults use Internet; 69% online daily
91% of them use e-mail 71% of workers regard email as
“essential” for their everyday work (Whittaker, 2005, p. 49).
MacKay, W. E. (1989). Diversity in the use of electronic mail: A preliminary inquiry. ACM Transactions on Office Information Systems, 6 (4), 380-397.PEW Internet & American Project. (2009). Online Activities and Internet: The mainstreaming of online life. Available online: http://www.pewinternet.orgWattenberg, M., Rohall, S. L., Gruen, D., & Kerr, B. (2005). Email research: Targeting the enterprise. Human-Computer Interaction, 20 (1/2), 139-162. Whittaker, S. (2005). Supporting collaborative task management in email. Human-Computer Interaction, 20 (1/2), 49-88.
Adopted from:
Knowledge workers average checking email 50 times/day, instant messaging 77 times, and visited over 40 websites
Email volume has doubled over last 5 years, to 40B person-to-person emails everyday (IBM Podcast, 2008)
Balancing proximity & distance
Contemporary conditions include fragmentation, diminished attention, interruptability, multitasking, dual processing, polychronicity, information overload, pseudo-attention deficit disorder (Lohr, 2007)
“Employees are said to spend about 50 to 90 minutes a day managing email” (Van Waes, 2003, p. 279).
How do I balance work with personal time, research, instruction, and extension, access with protected time, community interests with individual priorities, service goals with self?
Brown, J. S., & Duguid, P. (2000). The social life of information. Boston, MA: Harvard Business School P.Lohr, S. (2007). Is information overload a $650 billion drag on the economy? New York Times, December 20. Available online: http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2007/12/20/is-information -overload-a-650-billion-drag-on-the-economy/?scp=1andsq=information+overloadVan Waes, L. (2003). Use and misuse of email. Document Design, 4 (3), 279-280.
Adopted from:
Characterizing your e-mail use How many messages did you
send today? How many messages did you
receive today? Is this a typical day? How many mail folders do you
have? How many messages are in
your inbox? Is this typical? How many distribution lists do
you subscribe to? How often do you read your
email? Do you read all of your email?
MacKay, W. E. (1989). Diversity in the use of electronic mail: A preliminary inquiry. ACM Transactions on Office Information Systems, 6 (4), 380-397.Whittaker, S. (2005). Supporting collaborative task management in email. Human-Computer Interaction, 20 (1/2), 49-88.
Adopted from:
What percentage of messages do you wish you had never seen? (MacKay, 1989, p. 396)
Do you keep reminders? Do you keep an
electronic or hardcopy calendar?
Do you keep a separate to-do list(s)?
Can you identify messages related to most important work tasks? (Whittaker, 2005).
Making email your refrigerator
Require electricity, textual literacy, computer knowledge
Allow strangers and spammers to post messages
Invite hasty responses, accidental postings, flames
Make co-authoring a note difficult Organize themselves
chronologically Hide the contents of new notes Isolate communication exchange
and incidental viewing Last forever and get re-circulated
out of context.
PEW Internet & American Project. (2005). Online Activities and Internet: The mainstreaming of online life. Available online: http://www.pewinternet.org
Adopted from:
My refrigerator notes don’t:
Anticipating the email future
Bellotti, V., Ducheneaut, N., Howard, M., Smith, I., & Grinter, R. E. (2005). Quality versus quantity: Email-centric task management and its relation with overload. Human-Computer Interaction, 20 (1/2), 89-138.Human-Computer Interaction Lab, University of Maryland. Available online: http://www.cs.umd.edu/hcil/pubs/screenshots/Role-manager.shtml Gwizdka, J. (2002). Reinventing the inbox — Supporting the management of pending tasks in e-mail. Proceedings of CHI 2002 Conference, Minneapolis, MN, 550-551.
Adopted from:
Sample analysis of e-mail threads (p. 111):
Visualization role-manager interface (HCIL):
Task view inbox as calendar (p. 551):
Understanding the limitations of email
Blandford, A. E., & Green, T. R. G. (2001). Group and individual time management tools: What you get is not what you need. Personal and Ubiquitous Computing, 5 (4), 213-230.Ducheneaut, N., & Watts, L. A. (2005). In search of coherence: A review of email research. Human-Computer Interaction, 20 (1/2), 11-48.
Adopted from:
Reminders of appointments and to-dos
Other time-based information
Group uses A record of past activities Portability Ready accessibility Visual salience in the work
setting Fluidity of visual structure Local versus global view Scarring
Problems: Prioritizing intentions Expressiveness of
technologies Explicit and implicit
information Event series Typographic Not face-to-face
communication
“E-mail is an evolving sociotechnical phenomenon” (Ducheneaut & Watts, 2005, p. 12)
Working with email strategically Identify essential information Produce accurate, brief, clear
messages Consider alternative media Keep relevant content at hand Preserve the ongoing work-state
of incomplete activities Save content that might be
needed again in the future Find things in the overwhelming
and generally growing mass of content
Prioritize the “must-do’s” against the “would-be-nice-to-do’s”
Get rid of irrelevant content (Bellotti, et al. (2005, p. 101).
Bellotti, V., Ducheneaut, N., Howard, M., Smith, I., & Grinter, R. E. (2005). Quality versus quantity: Email-centric task management and its relation with overload. Human-Computer Interaction, 20 (1/2), 89-138.
Adopted from:
Minimize copying (consider audience, purpose, goals)
Organize according to priorities: from direct report, messages to you, to you and others, and copied to you
Streamline workflow.
Employing simple email tactics
Regularly scanning the inbox; often scrolling up and down Turning off ping; avoiding dependence on constant email updates Learning keystroke shortcuts and exploring your email application Sorting, by sender, flags, other prioritizing systems, to find items
more easily than in the default time-and-date-based view Deleting items to clean-out irrelevant, distracting content in the inbox Storing currently relevant items in task application Marking email messages as unread (or critical or important, etc.) Storing items in appropriately labeled email folders and subfolders to
be worked on together in the future Archiving messages in email folders for reference Inspecting or searching in folders in email and using other technical
or nontechnical methods of keeping work prioritized Making a calendar event to remind oneself to do something (Bellotti,
et al., 2005, p. 102).
Bellotti, V., Ducheneaut, N., Howard, M., Smith, I., & Grinter, R. E. (2005). Quality versus quantity: Email-centric task management and its relation with overload. Human-Computer Interaction, 20 (1/2), 89-138.
Adopted from:
Remembering netoric, not netiquette
Albion.com, & Ross, S. T. (2004). Netiquette. Available online: http://www.albion.com/netiquette/book/index.htmlLanham, R. A. (2002). The audit of virtuality: Universities in the attention economy. In S. Brint (Ed.), The future of the city of intellect: The changing American university (pp. 159-180). Stanford, CA: Stanford UP.
Adopted from:
Remember the human, that is, your audience, their time constraints, work patterns, communication styles, organizational habits
Set high-level priorities for your work and personal life
Adhere to the same standards of behavior online that you follow in real life
Know where you are in cyberspace and for how long and what purposes
Respect other people’s time and bandwidth
Make yourself look good online Share expert knowledge Help keep flame wars under control
(reflect) Respect other people’s privacy Don’t abuse your power Be forgiving of other people’s mistakes
“The digital medium is not a neutral conduit any more than print was…. The rhetoric of digital expression is already in use across academic life, at least in embryo, and its implications are clear enough and profound” (pp. 175-176)
Internalizing netoric
Felder, R. M. (2006). A whole new mind for a flat world. Chemical Engineering Education, 40(2), 96–97.Putnam, R. D. (2000). Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community. New York: Simon and Schuster.
Adopted from:
Knowledge work is creative, entrepreneurial, holistic, multidisciplinary, global, interpersonal, relational, self-directed, and flexible (Felder, 2006, p. 96)
“The proportion of us who say we ‘always feel rushed’ jumped by more than half between the mid-1960s and the mid-1990s” (Putnam, 2000, p. 189)