Managers' email: Beyond tasks and to-dos

Abstract

In this paper, we describe preliminary findings that indicate that managers and non-mangers think about their email differently. We asked three research managers and three research non-managers to sort about 250 of their own email messages into categories that would help them to manage their work. Our analyses indicate that managers create more categories and a more differentiated category structure than non-managers. Our data also suggest that managers create relationship-oriented categories more often than non-managers. These results are relevant to research on email overload that has highlighted the use of email for activities beyond communication. In particular, our findings suggest that too strong a focus on task management may be incomplete, and that a user's organizational role has an impact on their conceptualization and likely use of email.