All those email folders? A waste of time

Research suggests email users who use the search function find their stuff faster than assiduous filers.

Vindication at last for those of us who refuse to put our emails in carefully labelled folders: it only slows you down. A study by IBM has found that email users who use the search function access (or “refind”, as the study puts it) the sought correspondence faster and more accurately than those who sort through files or folders.

From the abstract to the study (in PDF form here):

We carried out a field study of 345 long-term users who conducted over 85,000 refinding actions.

Our data support opportunistic access. People who create complex folders indeed rely on these for  retrieval, but these preparatory behaviors are inefficient and do not improve retrieval success. In contrast, both search and threading promote more effective finding

Our intrepid researchers discovered that it takes and average of 17 seconds to retrieve an email via search – less than a third of the 58 seconds it took by going via folders.

The study highlights an example of “administrivia”, writes Michael Schrage in a blog for the Harvard Business Review, “where the energy literally isn’t worth the effort”.

For Schrage, advances in technology mean the very idea of “getting organised” has “the aroma of anachronism”. He writes:

Ongoing improvement in email/document/desktop and cloud-centric search frees them from legacy information management behaviours like filing.

Similarly, they want meeting invitations and schedules with embedded links that instantly trigger — and sync — commitments on their calendars. They don’t want to spend more time overseeing scheduling logistics; they expect their technologies to smoothly structure time slots and highlight — and even anticipate — conflicts in advance.

They’re “organising” for flexibility, adaptiveness and immediate response. More accurately, their technologies exist to give them greater speed and flexibility. Their personal organizational ethos reflects a Toyota Production System “just-in-time” attitude. The technical configuration facilitates a pull — not push — time management. Organisation has given way to improvisation.

The major lesson, according to Scrage:

The new economics of personal productivity mean that the better organized we try to become, the more wasteful and inefficient we become. We’ll likely get more done better if we give less time and thought to organization and greater reflection and care to desired outcomes.

Our job today and tomorrow isn’t to organise ourselves better; it’s to get the right technologies that respond to our personal productivity needs. It’s not that we’re becoming too dependent on our technologies to organise us; it’s that we haven’t become dependent enough.