I love the analogy of bears catching fish.

I still believe that there are product opportunities that would (using your bell curve model) skew the “effectiveness” range, allowing people to gain value from larger inboxes.

I’ll use a river metaphor too.

With “existing solutions”, you are panning for gold. Why not just stand at the side and swish water around in your screen, instead of going to all that work to stand in the middle of the river? You still get (roughly) the same amount of gold, for a lot less effort.

With “a new solution”, you could potentially be redirecting the flow of the river with hydraulics to blast more water and sediment through stationary screens, increasing the yield of your efforts dramatically.

I think that’s the product opportunity.

That said, I still contend that behavior is the only way to “completely” address the issue. But the right technology could make it better.

When you get very few emails, your email app is not typically a powerful tool for you since it doesn’t hold very much information and is only really useful for broadcasting. As email volume increases, the importance of the email application and its content starts to increase dramatically, which begets more email, but we quickly reach a threshold where the amount of time and effort required to process and maintain our email system outstrips the value of the information contained in it. This is compounded by both the number of email accounts/applications you use (active and passive) and the changing signal-to-noise ratio (the more email you get, the more likely that it’s more noise than signal).

An added factor is that there is a vanity component to email overload. The amount of email you receive is perceived as proportional to your importance, which explains the proliferation of mobile email devices amongst both corporate and personal users.

Think of processing email the way a bear thinks about catching fish in a river. The bear could wade out to the middle of the river and try to grab the fish as they swim by, but being in the middle of the river makes it difficult to not only select a fish to catch but the current of rushing water also acts as a force that pushes against the bear even when it’s not trying to catch a fish. Tiring and not very effective.

It’s better for the bear to stand on the edge of the river and pluck the fish out of the water as it swims by. It doesn’t have the opportunity to catch every fish, but the effort expended is in more in line with the benefits of the catch.

Pluck your emails out of the river instead of trying to catch them all.

Welcome to Tyner Blain and thanks for the comments!

On a personal level, I agree with you completely. And that’s part of why I chose the dieting comparison. I also believe that there is a lot of money to be made providing products that attempt to address (and actually help, while not completely resolving) problems.

Everyone – go read Matthew’s links – the first really spells out an approach to changing behavior such that it reduces email. The second is a very interesting analysis of how our “old brains” get in the way of our new environments (excess email/information and excess food).

Thanks for sharing those with us!

More here, if you’re interested: http://matthewcornell.org/blog/2007/10/got-email-blues-only-three-things-you.html

Also, the diet comparison is an apt one – it highlights choice. We must be on the same wavelength – I wrote: What GTD And Weight Watchers Have In Common
http://matthewcornell.org/blog/2008/02/what-gtd-and-weight-watchers-have-in.html

Cheers!