A Time and Place for Preparatory Methods in Email

Despite the communication of information via Email that is meant to prepare us and make us more organised, Email is fast becoming an unmanageable source of productive information meeting unproductive ends. The Email environment, with its suite of time and task management aids, is proving too fragmentary. Effort expended in categorising and organising incoming information is not rewarded with intelligent forewarning and awareness-generation of deadlines and obligations. With preparatory methods (information organisation behaviour) declining in favour of opportunistic methods that do not facilitate recall or prioritisation, attempts to re-invigorate preparatory methods are required to encourage the continued practice of organisation in Email. To understand what is required of preparatory methods to garner interest from Email users, we conducted a user interface study that targeted the management and awareness-generation aspects of temporal (time-related) information in the Email environment. Our results indicate that users' desire to organise information is not extinguished, but a careful emphasis on assistance is necessary to once again make these preparatory methods an attractive proposition.