Email Overload Survey - Results and Analysis

A few weeks ago I asked for your help in filling out a survey about how you use your email program and what your mail load was like. Well the results are in, and, as promised, here's what you said:

• Dealing with email after being away from your desk or on vacation is a problem for everyone, regardless of how much email you get.
• Subscribing to newsletters and mailing lists have no impact on how you feel about email overload.
• Overload isn't just a matter of how many messages you receive, it's also an issue of how often you feel you have to check your email. (Ever sat there clicking "Send/Receive" as you wait for an important message? That's just as bad as being faced with 100 unread emails.)
• We're actually getting less spam than last year, probably due to better filtering systems.
• And the kicker: The more email you keep in your inbox, the more you feel overloaded. (I can't stress this enough. Time after time I run into users who have thousands of messages in their inbox, and they say they don't know how to deal with it all. Then you look at those messages and half is spam, a third is old newsletters, and the bulk dates back to the '90s. The answer is simple: Delete unneeded or completed messages and file "keepers" into folders!)

You can find the full analysis at ClearContext's site here, and the CEO has some additional overload analysis available on his blog. Check them both out for some startling and interesting results, and thanks all for participating in the survey.