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Seeing that this experiment was run in April 2011, I sure would like to see a follow up on how it turned out.
I just sent him an email alerting him to this thread and asking for the results. Let's see if he responds.
In the late 1990s I worked for a large government agency as part of a job that employed over 1200 contractors (Welcome to government work.) Each day I'd get incredible amounts of email -- most of which was completely useless to me. Before I left, I asked if I could form a small team and take part in a 2-3 month project. They had initially planned on a team of 20, but I felt that small teams, left alone and working in…
Unfortunately people waking to your cube has even more disruption power so I'm not sure why you preferred that option. Perhaps you were surrounded by people who used very careful judgement before calling or walking to someone's cube. But "Do you have a second" is not enough. You've already taken up three seconds, and now I have to respond, and to do that I have to guess whether what you have to say is important to me right now or not. My focus is gone. This is why I prefer to work remotely. I decide when to switch focus and for what reason.
For all the talk about email overload, I'm surprised more people don't do stuff like this. It's simple and effective. Instead, everyone wants an AI solution that automatically separates the important from the fluff. I hate to be a pessimist, but I'm doubtful we'll produce a notable success in this area any time soon, if ever. Priority Inbox certainly isn't it. I spent so much time double-checking its often-wrong resu…