Productivity

In 1987, John M. Carroll and Mary Beth Rosson published their paper “Paradox of the active user” (PDF here, reprinted here), in which they observed that most users don’t read the manuals but start using the software immediately, and that once they figure out how to do something they will not learn a new way of doing it even if it is going to be faster.

Also mentioned here,
Wired article,
The Good Easy essay (for Mac OS 9… terribly useless),
something about it,

the guy (Mark Wurst) has also written a paper called “Managing Incoming Email”, which is basically worthless — see the comments here.