Am I Wasting My Time Organizing Email? A Study of Email Refinding

TL;DR — IBM Research tracked 345 users’ 85,000 email searches: people who file into folders find things no better than people who just search.

CHI 2011, IBM Research. The team instrumented an email client with search, folders, tags and threads and studied 345 long-term users across more than 85,000 refinding actions. Users who build complex folders do rely on them, but that preparation is inefficient and does not improve retrieval success; search and threading work better. Scrolling turned out to be the most common refinding behaviour.

What it is: a peer-reviewed field study (the top-scoring post of the batch). It has obvious implications for how a personal wiki is organised.

Where this came from

• r/obscurePDFs post, May 2020 — “Am I wasting my time organizing email? A study of email refinding”. Routing record: The obscurePDFs Subreddit
• Link as posted: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1L2puefuIL-vLsfovIOIpLmTMQJRR2FSk/

10 pages. A copy is archived locally against link rot; the header links the original source.