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The grim reaper: the curse of e-mail (1).

Article Excerpt
In 1982, I spent a happy and productive sabbatical leave at New York University. While I was there, I had my first encounter with electronic mail. New York University was one of the early nodes on the Internet. Colleagues within the Department of Information Systems had embraced the new technology quickly. Through necessity, I soon became an adept user of e-mail.

A colleague of mine who is an accountant often reminds me of a conversation he had with me when I returned from New York University to the University of Queensland. During our conversation, I explained the nature of e-mail to him. He recalls his scepticism about e-mail and his belief that it was just another technological fad that would be short-lived. Subsequently he became a dean of a large faculty. Like many of us, his life now seems ruled by e-mail. He often speaks publicly about his early comments to me on the likely success of e-mail as an example of how wrong we can be when we try to predict the future.

Nowadays, it is common for me to receive between 50 and 150 e-mail messages in a single day. I am on few mailing lists. Moreover, little spam mail gets through the filters that my university uses. In short, much of the e-mail I receive is substantive. Some can be dealt with fairly quickly. Some requires several hours of work to provide an appropriate response. From conversations with many colleagues, I know my situation with e-mail is not atypical.

For many of us, I suspect we have a love-hate relationship with e-mail. On the one hand, we could not accomplish many tasks without e-mail. For instance, I now maintain frequent, productive interactions with many colleagues around the world. My life has been much enriched through these interactions. I know that I could not sustain these interactions if I had to rely on surface mail, airmail, or telephone conversations. Some tasks I now do also would be difficult, if not impossible, in the absence of e-mail. For instance, the management of a journal like the MIS Quarterly is much easier with e-mail.

On the other hand, e-mail now imposes some high costs on our lives. For some time, I have been attempting to better understand and to articulate these costs. I sense e-mail has wrought some deep changes in my life both professionally and personally. I know many colleagues have this sense too. If we are seeking the Internet's "killer application," in my more-cynical moments I've come to the conclusion that e-mail is it. Both literally and figuratively, I now view e-mail as truly a "killer" application! Some days, I feel the deluge of e-mail will be the death of me.

My goal in these editorial comments is twofold. First, I am seeking to motivate more research on e-mail. In my opinion, we lack a deep understanding of the impact that e-mail has had on our lives. Increasingly, I believe that both the professional and personal impacts on us have been profound, yet our understanding of these impacts remains fragmented and superficial. Similarly, I feel we lack a good understanding of the impacts of e-mail on groups and organizations. The situation is akin to our early understanding of the impacts of personal computers on our lives. We thought we understood the impacts, but we are still witnessing changes wrought by personal computers that we had never anticipated.

Second, I feel strongly that we need better ways of managing e-mail and assisting users of e-mail to deal better with the problems it poses. Somehow we have to devise and enforce protocols that will result in senders of e-mail messages reflecting on and evaluating better the impacts that their messages might have on the receivers of their messages. We also need to help receivers of e-mail messages cope more effectively with the amount and types of messages they confront. Knowledge workers, in particular, require assistance. They are major users of e-mail. They are also responsible for managing their own productivity. Knowledge workers need to understand those e-mail practices that enhance their productivity and those that undermine it. They also need to be familiar with and capable of using technologies that will assist them to deal effectively with e-mail. If they work as members of an organization, the information systems function within the organization also must be well placed to support them. In short, we have human, technological, and in some cases organizational problems to solve.

In the sections below, I have examined briefly some phenomena associated with receivers and senders of e-mail that I consider to be problematical. I seek your indulgence if what follows appears to be a litany of woes in relation to e-mail and perhaps somewhat satirical. I fully understand that e-mail has both benefits and costs. You will see quickly, however, that in this editorial I have taken a somewhat jaundiced view of e-mail. I have done so purposefully to try to show that e-mail phenomena provide a rich lode to mine for research purposes. Curiously, we have little published research about e-mail in our major information systems journals, (2) even though for many of us it represents perhaps the most-significant computer application we use. In this light, I hope to motivate more high-quality research and more high-quality publications on e-mail.

Some Professional Impacts of E-Mail

Perhaps the most-obvious impact of e-mail on our work life is that many of us now spend large amounts of time dealing with the messages we receive. From one perspective, the problem is simply the number of e-mail messages that require our attention. In-bound messages take time to read. Often our organizations require that we keep them on file rather than delete them. Similarly, our own work needs may mean we have to...

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