so i’m trying to whittle away at my work email inbox, which i have been managing with labels and not really filing as a sort of experiment, but now there are over 1500 messages in it, and some have just got to go. i figure if i just spend 20 minutes or so at a time i will conquer it eventually.

anyway this is interesting for other reasons because i’m thinking a lot about email categorization for my capstone.

so i just found this message that is an autoreply that says : “sorry, i don’t work in the bursar’s office anymore. please write someone else from now on.”
what is the best way to handle a message like that?
a lot of my job is actually about remembering who to contact about different things, and the “right” person changes all the time, so this isn’t that rare. but i’m thinking “where can this go where i would actually see it when it is relevant?” the way it usually goes is i remember some conversation i had with someone and figure that’s the person i should talk to, so i search for things about that conversation until i find the person, and i write them. but i don’t always find ALL of the messages from that person, so the odds that i’m going to find this one, telling me to write someone else, are slim. in fact, since i got that message, i Have written this person about something else, but i only just realized it now, and that’s because my inbox is so frickin full that they show up next to each other when i sort by sender. if i had filed the other message away somewhere based on what it was about, rather than who it was from, that couldn’t happen, and even if it could, it makes no sense to think that i would scan All the messages from Every person just in case there’s something like this there.

so what if i was able to attach a note to the address itself? something so that, if i tried to type it again, it gave me a little warning? that could be useful for other kinds of messages, too – i wish i could attach all messages with contact info to the address of the person, so that if i’m wondering what their latest address or their id number is i could just look to see if any of those sorts of messages are attached to the name rather than scouring for them in contact info dumping grounds or gambling on whether i updated the info somewhere else.
that would be great.

but would a better solution to this particular problem be to use more aliases for official stuff like this? i’ve often thought of a scheme wherein iu maintains some kind of central lookup for employees that matches common questions to aliases and then you just always write to that alias no matter who has the job. they have things like bursar@indiana.edu and imuhotel@indiana.edu, but you still end up talking to more specific people most of the time and then that person gets email forever from everyone who ever talked to them, even if they change jobs. or maybe you could make your own aliases, like guytoaskaboutjohn’scontract@indiana.edu, and you would only have to tell it once.

dunno.
there are three real problems here, i guess – the job shifting problem, the not knowing who to ask problem, and then the classification problem that originally got me thinking – how should we handle it when a message isn’t really related to another collection of messages, but to an address?
or a date?
would that be the same?
i’ve struggled with how to file things that were something like “look at me again next thursday”, and that could be addressed by being able to attach the email to the date

or you could just use jminder for that one, i guess (you can pay me royalties, later, josh ;)

so whatever, just thinkin aloud
the question i’m left with is something like: if there are a lot of ways to approach a problem, how do you know which are bandaids and which are getting at the root of the matter? if bandaids are easy do they still have a place? can’t they point to the root in ways that trying to dig it out by just puzzling about it can’t? is there a rule to help tell when they are doing that vs. when they are just holding something together that really should be sold for scrap and started anew?

so this morning i went to a two-hour training for the new purchasing system that IU is switching over to later this month. my hci brain had a hard time with it, because quite a bit of time was taken up with phrases like “ohmigod, it is So intuitive! i mean, you might have trouble for a little while with something like forgetting that there’s that one search box where you have to surround the string with asterisks but then in the others you don’t, but… seriously! you’ll figure it out in no time!”

i mostly just sat there and drank my coffee and enjoyed the sick thrill of being able to place an order for 20 microliters of chair in the training environment.

seriously, though, there are a lot of ways that they are totally right. the current system is hoRRendous, and this is a major improvement, so they deserve some credit. that said, it just drives home how low most people’s expectations are, and it makes me feel a bit like i’m living on the lunatic fringe for expecting systemic change.

when i’m honest though, i also think that there is some level where it might not matter that it could be done better. that sounds kind of defeatist, but really i’m just saying: look, do we want to spend all our time shaving seconds and errors off of something that gets the job done? or do we want to get the job done, and move on to new jobs? the problem is, when we start being satisfied with good enough, it makes it harder to see the new possibilities that open up when we push ourselves to find something better. it’s as if all the problems and solutions are wound up together in one big gordian knot, and loosening one section has implications in parts of the system that seemed totally unrelated when we started tugging on the rope…

so i was just called over to the office of the friendly 70 year old math professor who works down the hall. he was having a problem – someone had emailed him a file, and he wanted to change it. he opened the attachment, made his changes, saved it, and then went to open the attachment again and didn’t understand why the changes weren’t there. he wanted to email the new version to someone else, but couldn’t figure out where it went. in his mind, the file attached to the email was the only instance of the file, and he didn’t understand his temp folder, or the idea of making a local copy, or the fact that, to forward his revisions to someone else, he would have to eRase the copy that outlook automatically attached when he hit “forward”and replace it with his new, improved version. i started to explain it as simply as i could, but 5 minutes could not shake his mental model, which told him that the file existed as a part of his email, and always would. and you know what, why should he have to? i understand what happens with attachments, but i run into my own version of this problem all the time. i didn’t notice when word started saving attachments to temp by default, but it was a Stupid, Stupid day, imho. i appreciate that my desktop isn’t cluttered with all the detritus that i may really only view once, and i appreciate that my email has original versions as a record, but that appreciation doesn’t keep me from cursing on those times when i do edit the original, hit save like a good girl, and then realize that i have to navigate through fourteen levels of the computer to find the file again, and i can totally believe that a lot of people have the experience of my math professor friend – the file just disappears. but what is the best advice i can give him? why should he have to save the file to his desktop, or within another folder, when it is already a part of the email in his mind? why should he have to create another email and keep track of them both?

in case you don’t know this, i’m focusing on categorization for my capstone, and the ways that our current computer models don’t align with our mental models don’t align with the potential that computers hold for helping us keep meaningful track of the masses of information at our fingertips. so this was a good random help session for me to be a part of, even though all i could really do this time was do the task for him, help him cobble together a bad, temporary solution in case he wants to edit the file again, and feel embarrased when he thanked me.

i want to make it better, and while filing an email attachment doesn’t seem like all that much in the big scheme of things, i think that it is. i think that as long as people feel like information + computer = jumbled and mysterious, we are missing out on a whole boatload of the ways that information + brains = beautiful. and that makes me sad, and angry, and afraid.