With all due respect to Mark Twain, I took small liberty in making his famous quote relevant for this blog. His original statement was a small respect he granted to the press - Never get in a fight with someone who buys ink by the barrell.

This Monday morning I thought I will stretch myself in understanding what makes email inbox a happy inbox or if there is anything like that to begin with. We all approach our inboxes with mixed feelings. Work, surprises, bugs, bad news, good news, system messages (automated messages also generate feelings!) etc etc. We go through this sentimental roller coaster early in the morning.

To stop myself from stating anything obvious here, I did a quick Google search on “sad inbox” and Michael Arrington’s link came on top. Though it was on entirely different context.

Email content carries certain kind of sentiment. Depending on the type of sentiment it evokes, this can have effect what researchers call “mental departure”. Is it possible that early morning inbox drill, an average knowledge worker goes through, can result in what this research terms - cognitive turnover? Can this be managed in a better way?

Can organizations control this by filtering email content for it’s emotional impact? If you are a fortune 500 company and majority of your employees emailed today’s financial news, do you think as a CEO you lost half day of your employee productivity?

Negative news generating negative response and that resulting in what my modified title said in the begining - never get in a fight with your co-worker who emails ink by the barrell

I think it’s high time for companies to invest in sentiment classification and routing toxic emails to platform where immediate impact on employee productivity is less. Can carefully controlled social platform enable this process? Something to think about.