EMAIL overload need not be so unmanageable, thanks to a new planning tool which makes it easier to spot urgent messages in a bulging inbox.
along with colleagues at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, devised the Reflective Agents with Distributed Adaptive Reasoning (Radar) system to help tame out-of-control inboxes.
The system relies on human trainers to teach it what words might characterise the tasks involved in, say, organising a conference, and how a worker might prioritise them. It then scans a user鈥檚 inbox and orders the emails by priority.
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The team tested Radar using a group of volunteers who were asked to pick up the planning of a large conference with only a full inbox to guide them. Some emails contained critical tasks 鈥� such as finding a new room for a scheduled speaker 鈥� others were unimportant or even unhelpful.
Faulring found that volunteers given the tool significantly outperformed those left to sort through the emails unaided, and made fewer mistakes. The results were presented at the conference in Hong Kong, China, last month.
