Staying sane in the face of information overload

About two months ago, an email was sent round our office that turned our messaging world upside down. It was from our network administrator, James, and it told everyone to cease and desist from storing information on Outlook.

Apparently most of us deal with the information overload by madly filing emails into sub-folders of Outlook sub-folders. Most of us regard the 'Sent Items' section as a sacrosanct repository of knowledge on par with the Vatican library. It's driving James round the bend.

"By storing emails in Outlook rather than in shared files on the network, you're compromising both the speed of the email system and the integrity of the data," he argues. "Haven't you people ever seen the delete option?"

I admit that I have a problem. There are 1,118 items in my inbox at last count. I haven't even read half of them.

According to a recent study from The User Group (TUG), that makes me an "information-hoarder", someone who refuses to put items in communal folders because knowledge is power.

Nothing could be further from the truth. I just can't read all this stuff. If there's knowledge in there, I stand no chance of finding it, much less sharing it.

In true 21st century fashion, I sought professional help. Alastair Dijksman is an email shrink (more commonly known as a consultant) with Morphix, a company that has developed software to help deal with information overload. Like all good shrinks, Dijksman tells me to place the blame for my problem on someone else - not my parents in this case - but my co-workers.

People use email to cover themselves, he tells me, and cc'd mail is the best example of this.

He explained: "When decisions are made that you're not happy about, someone will say: 'I sent you an email about this. Didn't you read it?' These people aren't communicating, they're just dumping responsibility onto someone else."

TUG agrees. Its study found the average employee spends nearly three hours each day dealing with email, much of this due to the bad habits of users. Researchers cited copied mail as the worst offence.

Telecoms firm, Mitel, conducted its own study and found nearly 65 per cent of respondents use email to avoid confrontation. Sarah Morgan, marketing manager at Mitel, dubbed these people "digital cowards".

"It's an etiquette problem," she said. "You shouldn't write or send anything that you wouldn't have the bottle to say to someone's face."

Both studies found most users have never received training on how to use email to reduce information overload. And that role can't be left to the IT department alone, according to Dijksman.

"In very few organisations is anyone responsible for the effectiveness of email as a business tool," he said. "No one knows what value email has to an organisation. We simply say that we have to use it. If the TUG survey is right and a third of every employee's day is spent dealing with email, then that's a serious investment of time and a very real cost."

Better behaviour by users will cut down on the number of emails, but maybe not for long. The information cramming our email inboxes isn't just a replacement for the paper memos that were stacked on our desks ten years ago. Far more information is being generated - and ignored - today, and the volume is not decreasing. Two years ago, says The User Group, the average time spent on email each day was only 90 minutes. Researchers expect to see the time hit four hours by next year.

And as Morgan points out, everyone who sends an email expects an immediate response.

None of which solves James' central problem, which is that our coping strategy - the email filing system - is making the Exchange server sluggish and endangering all the information held there.

The only solution is to change the way we use email, as the quantity and type of content has reached almost unsustainable levels. Important documents will have to be saved to a safer place and we'll all have to stop simply forwarding information that we haven't read. And the internal mailing lists need to go.

If we won't do it for our own mental health, let's do it for the health of the server.