Managing Long Term Communications: Conversation and Contact Management

Contact management is an important part of everyday work. People exchange business cards to try to enter each other’s contact lists. Local businesses provide refrigerator magnets and calendars so they will be called on when a particular need arises. People who use the telephone extensively are selective about who they add to their speed dial lists. Contact management and conversation management are linked. Many busy professionals discourage voice calls and messages, because email enables them to better manage their time, conversations, and contacts. People also spend large amounts of time transcribing voicemail, browsing email archives and writing todo lists – all of these activities are intended to help track the content and status of outstanding conversations. Together, these practices reveal some of the complexities of contact and conversation management. We investigated contact and conversation management by carrying out twenty semi-structured interviews with professionals in ...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2002
• Where: HICSS
• Authors: Steve Whittaker, Quentin Jones, Loren G. Terveen
• Keywords: Biometrics, Contact Management, Conversation Management, HICSS 2002, Multiple Concurrent Conversations