{"id":5944,"date":"2014-01-14T09:16:20","date_gmt":"2014-01-14T14:16:20","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/alifeofproductivity.com\/?p=5944"},"modified":"2022-09-02T15:57:24","modified_gmt":"2022-09-02T15:57:24","slug":"stop-organizing-email-folders-searching-email-way-faster-study","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/chrisbailey.com\/stop-organizing-email-folders-searching-email-way-faster-study\/","title":{"rendered":"Stop organizing your email into folders: Searching your email is way faster (study)"},"content":{"rendered":"<div class='et-box et-tick'>\n\t\t\t\t\t<div class='et-box-content'><b class=\"takeaway\">Takeaway:<\/b> Stop organizing your email; searching through your inbox is way faster.<\/p>\n<p><strong class=\"readingtime\">Estimated Reading Time:<\/strong> 1 minute, 12s.<\/div><\/div>\n<p><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"wp-image-5945 aligncenter\" src=\"https:\/\/chrisbailey.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/01\/1102038_25845967-1024x830.jpg\" alt=\"Mail message\" width=\"675\" height=\"547\" \/><\/p>\n<p>A <span style=\"text-decoration: underline;\"><a href=\"http:\/\/people.ucsc.edu\/~swhittak\/papers\/chi2011_refinding_email_camera_ready.pdf\">recent study by IBM<\/a><\/span> (PDF) asked the question: what takes less time, searching through your inbox to find a buried email, or organizing your email into folders?<\/p>\n<p>To figure that out, researchers analyzed \u201c345 long-term users who conducted over 85,000 refinding actions\u201d, a whopping sample size to say the least, and they discovered some pretty incredible results. I\u2019ll spare you the fluff and jump right to the main result:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Searching through your inbox is much faster. On average, it took participants 66.07s to search for an email, and 72.87s to find an email in a folder.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p><b>But the study doesn\u2019t take into account how much time a user spends sorting their emails in the first place!<\/b> When you add in that time (the study measured that \u201cpeople spend an average of 10% of their total email time filing messages\u201d), searching through your inbox is the winner by a wide margin.<\/p>\n<p>I\u2019ll agree, there\u2019s something to be said about <span style=\"text-decoration: underline;\"><a title=\"Kick procrastination and focus easier by \u201cclearing to neutral\u201d\" href=\"https:\/\/chrisbailey.com\/clearing-to-neutral\/\">clearing your inbox to neutral<\/a><\/span> so you you can start fresh every time you fire up your email, but you still shouldn\u2019t spend any more time sorting your email than you need to.<\/p>\n<p>As the study put it, you \u201cmight expect folder-access to be more successful than search, [because you] have made deliberate efforts to organize messages into specific memorable categories\u201d, but search is so much more efficient at the end of the day because it takes you so long to organize and sift through your folders.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>A recent study found that finding email through search is way faster than organizing your inbox into folders.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":5945,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v22.5 - 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