"[Managers] would like to be able to track outstanding promises they have made, promises made to them, requests they've made that have not been met and requests made of them that they have not fulfilled." [1]

Despite the popularity of email as a task management tool, studies of organisational email use have identified problems with "keeping track of lots of concurrent actions: One's own to-dos and to-dos one expects from others" [2] using existing email clients. We are working to augment existing email software to automatically identify and help users manage these requests and commitments.

Our analysis of real-world email data, however, has revealed a range of interesting edge cases that make even human annotation of requests and commitments difficult. Simple canonical examples of requests and commitments are not representative of the ways people make requests, offers and promises in real-world email.

We will ask the HCSNet audience for their opinions regarding the presence or absence of requests and commitments in several contentious email messages drawn from the Enron email corpus.

[1] D. E. Murray. "Conversation for Action: The Computer Terminal as Medium of Communication", 1991, John Benjamins Publishing Co.

[2] V. Bellotti, N. Ducheneaut, M. Howard and I. Smith. "Taking email to task: The design and evaluation of a task management centred email tool", in Proceedings of CHI 2003, Ft Lauderdale, Florida, pp. 345-352.

Authors: Andrew Lampert

Event: SF08: Speed Papers

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