There's a geek truth that says something along the lines--all applications expand until they include email. The non-geek corollary is that everything you do/receive/respond to on the computer should be able to be accessed through email because that's the first program you fire up in the morning and the last one you shut down at night.

So, it's not at all a surprise that everybody gets way too much stuff in email, that they have trouble keeping track of it, and that people who have no business doing so, spend way too much time sending us things we never asked for and don't want.

Phil Windley says that, really, we need a bunch of other better stuff:

I've been thinking since I got home from a ten day vacation and had to process 2100 email messages about how much of my life is lived in my inbox. Of the 2100, almost 1700 of them were Spam and I'm not too concerned about those. SpamAssassin did a pretty good job and I have a feeling it or other technologies will eventually solve the Spam problem. What interests me are the 400 messages that were not Spam. At least 75% of those were messages that didn't really require my attention or could safely be ignored. Even of the remaining 100, many of them were more about coordination than real information. This has got me asking "what would it take to eliminate email from my life completely?"

I am a huge RSS fan--all those websites I used to click around to all the time--especially the ones that don't get updated very often, now come to me instead. I'm always looking for more information to flow to me via RSS. I've also reacehd a point where I lose stuff in email either because it's been mislabeled as spam or it scrolls off my screen or it gets lost in the incoming flood. So, I think Windley's new apps couple with dashboard idea is potentially pretty nifty:

One problem with moving from a single general purpose tool like email to multiple special purposes tools is split focus. To understand what I mean, think about RSS. RSS has reduced the number of mailing lists I subscribe to and consequently reduced my email traffic. Perfect application, except that now I have to remember to fire up my feed reader in addition to my mail client. I generally treat it as lower priority and so I'm reluctant to get high-priority information delivered by RSS. What happens when there are a dozen special purpose tools managing my workflow instead of just a linear email list?

I think the answer to this problem lies in creating a task dashboard and having the various applications, including email, post control messages to the dashboard so that I have a single place to manage the various messages that are coming to me, albeit outside email. I'm envisioning something more flexible that a simple dashboard. I want a rule engine, easy graphics, templates, and so on so that I can customize it to the way I want to work. There's lots to think about here.

On the other hand, one of the primary reasons people lose focus, don't respond, or overload is because there is too much stuff. Organizing stuff better doesn't actually eliminate this part of the problem. We have too much information coming at us, most of us are too busy, and we've created a 24/7 response expectation whether something requires that kind of response time or not (you didn't read your email yet? I sent it to you on Sunday?) Having too much stuff that's really, really organized doesn't eliminate the 'too much stuff' part of the equation. The more I work, the more I see that productivity and creativity would be improved exponentially by insisting that everyone walk away from the computer for at least a ten day to two week stretch once a year.