Have you ever wondered why people seem to be ignoring your emails? Are they seeing them? Did you not press send?
It turns out that “email deferral” is extremely common. So common, in fact, that Bahareh Sarrafzadeh from Waterloo’s David R. Cheriton School of Computer Science has co-authored a study about it.
There are typically five main reasons why you may not receive an email back from someone:
- time or effort involved in handling the email
- the identity of the sender
- the number of recipients on the thread
- the user’s workload and context, and
- the urgency of the email message.
After some research during an internship at Microsoft, Sarrafzadeh discovered that people may not be answering or checking emails because there are multiple recipients, or it was their peer. However, sometimes the opposite was true. When it was their peer, there was less effort needed to reply, because they already knew what the answer was.
During the study, the researchers interviewed 15 participants with a very diverse set of roles within their organization, ranging from product managers and researchers to software developers and interns to gain more insights about email deferral. They then examined anonymized action logs of tens of thousands of users of a popular commercial email client to verify the information obtained during the interviews.
The interviews showed that email deferral is a common practice, with around 16% of participants admitting to deferring at least one email per day.
With their model, the researchers believe that they will also be able to predict the user’s plan to return to an email they had originally deferred. The overall goal of this project would be to create a model that can reasonably predict the intention of the user and then design clients to remind users about an email they need to return to, allowing users to get tasks done more effectively and in a timely manner.