There is no single cure for email overload and Inbox Zero doesn’t claim to perform miracles. At the end of the day it’s a system, and it’s nothing without your own personal input. It might work for you and it might not. It’s important to remember that productivity systems are subjective beasts and that can be their ultimate downfall or the reason for their success.

What works for you won’t necessarily work for me. And for that reason you can’t say wholeheartedly that Inbox Zero works or it doesn’t. That’s just like saying that having cornflakes for breakfast doesn’t work. It’s simply a matter of personal preference or taste.

I've always been critical about email 'diets', although I view more contemporary efforts by Luis and Geoff to eliminate email with great interest.

Years ago I recommended the following:

• Where possible, eliminate the root cause of the problem. 
• Take control of your own inbox by managing it appropriately. 
• Lead by example and practice better e-mail etiquette and style.

At the root of this advice is that email is a communication tool that is often misappropriated as a collaboration tool. You can keep trying to fix your own inbox, but the problem is actually with everyone else using email.

The good news is that I hear more and more frequently how social business tools in the workplace do help to reduce email overload. We really have moved beyond marketing rhetoric.

I can even see it in my own work practices too - I use a combination of email (yes, its still there!), wiki, microblogging (enterprise microblogging and Twitter) and instant messaging. Of course, its the wiki and microblogging that make the critical difference, as they create a open plan workspace online where everyone can work out loud.

However, the root causes I identified originally still stand. Working out loud works best when:

• Everyone is working out loud (or at least 'in the room'). 
• People know why and understand how to work out loud. 
• Users are able to control how they consume the online open plan space.

Part of the reason for this is that its not simply about shifting communication that takes place in email to other channels. That would simply shift the location of the problem. Instead, we use different tools in the flow to deal with transient, situational and ambient communication and collaboration in different situations. See my Architected for Collaboration presentation for more on this.

Overall, this is a very different approach to the problem from the simplistic 'occupational spam' mentality. We eliminate the root cause of email overload, not the individual messages.

On a strictly personal front, I've noticed that the vast majority of personal email I receive these days comes in the form of notifications from other public social tools, subscriptions and automatic notifications (like my bank). However, the dynamic of personal use is very different from the workplace. In the workplace, we have the advantage of being able to choose the commons spaces where we will work out loud (assuming you are proactive about it).

The problem is that Twitter fails miserably at actually providing a way to get the full picture of the conversations that I want to follow or participate in.

Everyday I see a several messages (either main posts or replies/retweets) that interest me, but each time I'm frustrated by the inability to see all the responses that make up the complete conversation. Imagine being at a party where a dozen people are standing in a circle discussing something. Now what if each person could only hear a fraction of what's being said?

...

I'd really like to be able to see all the responses to these questions. I think I'd both benefit from, as well as be able to contribute to each conversation.

Don't get me wrong, I love microblogging. I understand security concerns, privacy, trust, etc. I just highly prefer the parent/child threaded model where all responses to a post are visible under the main topic. For example, in Facebook I can read responses from everyone, even if I'm not friends with them.

Alan is right, it can take a lot of effort on the part of a user to pull together a complete discussion thread on Twitter. However, I'm not entirely convinced a threaded model would work for Twitter, beyond the most simplistic reply thread view in the Twitter Web interface.

Twitter works slightly differently from Facebook and most of the enterprise microblogging tools I've come across, which do support the threaded model. For example, baked-in support for likes, group and other filters. Still, Twitter is open enough that someone could create a threaded interface - and in fact many have tried. Other than the 140 character limit, this minimal structuring is probably a critical difference between Twitter and other tools.

I do also wonder if we are expecting too much from microblogging concept. Because of the structure they offer, I sometimes feel that non-Twitter microblogging tools turn into discussion forums that simply have a desktop widget and real-time notifications. When this happens, they lose the utility of microblogging. Rather than a criticism of the tools, I think this perhaps suggests that:

• There are times when we want a less transient discussion but lack access to an appropriate place to do it; and 
• The way we integrate and link social objects across different social media channels still isn't good enough.

BTW Alan - I found your post via good old RSS.

If you're the type to meticulously file your emails in various folders in your client, stop, says a new study from IBM Research. By analyzing 345 users' 85,000 episodes of digging through old emails in search of the one they needed, researchers discovered that those who did no email organizing at all found them faster than those who filed them in folders.

By using search, the non-organizers were able to find the email they needed just as easily as filers. They also didn't have to spend any time filing email in folders, putting them ahead overall.

This is sure to cause arguments across corporate workplaces everywhere. :-)

I've never been convinced that algorithmic filters are the perfect solution either, even if we create them with diversity and serendipity as a goal:

But we need some level of social filtering at different times, just because of the pure volume of data available.

Look for human curators, as well as computers.

Hat tip to Elsua.

Qwiki creates an automated audio-visual over-view of any subject in Wikipedia. Bearing in mind this is only in alpha, I think this can only get better - it would be great on a company intranet too.

Apparently, we'll eventually be able to create Qwiki reports on ourselves, drawing on o social media profiles such as Facebook and LinkedIn. But by then I do hope they come up with a better name than 'qwiki' - think about it.

An article I wrote for IDM magazine earlier in the year about managing email in the enterprise is now available to read in full on the Headshift Australasia blog. This was intended to be a counterpoint to technology-centric approaches to dealing with email overload, so let me know what you think.

Also cross posted to the Dachis Group's Collaboratory blog.

Mark Nash proposes a nice little social media triaging system (Critical > Delayed > Rejected).

It reminds me that I blogged about being ruthless with RSS feeds back in 2007, but since that time the volume and access to different information and activity streams has definitely grown. Unfortunately it is also a reminder that our personal information practices that ultimately define our ability to control information overload continue to lag.

I wrote another piece about living with email, touching on similar issues. While the technologies are different, the common themes are:

• Information overload is as much a result of poor information managament practices as it is about the volume of information created by the technology.
• Individuals can't deal with information overload on their own, it requires collective effort (there are a number of dimensions to this).

Unfortunately, at least in an organisational context, until we start taking information work more seriously I think many people will continue to find information overload an issue.

In the meantime, remember that its ok to be ruthless with your social activity consumption.

The Attensa StreamServer™ creates value by:

• Breaking down information silos by enabling information from separate systems and communities to be found, organized and flow freely throughout your business.
• Networking knowledge by enabling people to easily share insight and knowledge with others.
• Increasing awareness and efficiency by empowering users to benefit from large amounts of information and many interactions as opposed to being overwhelmed.

Attensa have announced the availability of Attensa StreamServer, their next generation enterprise information aggregator. I'm really pleased to see Attensa continue to innovate around this important area and I'll be taking a more detailed look at their new StreamServer product in the near future.

We need to stop designing tools and platforms which are simply meant to allow people to connect, share and collaborate more. In doing this we are being incredibly irresponsible with the resource we value most. Instead we need to design for business intent and utilize our efficiencies as tools to help solve real business problems.

Jevon is talking about the risk of new social computing technologies absorbing more of people's attention, rather than helping them to work more effectively. I think people - particularly in a business setting - intuitively recognise this issue. For example, if you are already working 60 hours week and addicted to your Blackberry, do you really want to add Yammer (a corporate Twitter-style platform) to that mix?

Of course, the point is that we don't actually want to add to (or overload) people's attention quota - instead we want to substitute. Here I think there is a misunderstanding about the 'emergent' aspects of social computing tools. Its not about chaos (and therefore more noise, more distractions, etc), but rather a different approach to designing solutions to actual business problems that is enabled by the characteristics of social computing tools. For example, we know from our experiences with enterprise wikis that it is easier for users to work within a loosely pre-defined structure, but we don't need to design every aspect of the information or business process architecture at the beginning.

Similarly, intent in Social Business Design provides that strategic framework. Rather than throwing resources and tools randomly into an organisation, we actually do it with an objective in mind.