This email is important........but to whom
I had a long day yesterday and little access to my email, so while watching Jamie does...... I checked my mail and I found a number of emails which were marked as important so naturally had a look at those first. To my surprise one of the mails was a list of training courses available for the coming month and my first reaction was "Why has this person marked this as important, it's not important to me." and following on from this I have been thinking about relative importance of emails.
I do not, as a matter of course, use the important button unless I am sending something to my team that I want them look at quickly. As I do not do it often the impact appears to be OK because they check the mails I send them pretty quickly anyway but this extra emphasis gets the results.
When sending an email to someone who is not in my team I very, very, rarely use the important button because important is a subjective assessment. Things that I consider important in my role may be of minor importance to other people in the organisation.
I also see people using the subject to highlight urgency. My normal reaction to this is that if it was urgent why use an unpredictable tool like email, pick up the phone to me.
So I will take from this to consider what I rank as important or urgent and weigh this against other peoples view.
The Sunday Lunch Project Manager
I do not, as a matter of course, use the important button unless I am sending something to my team that I want them look at quickly. As I do not do it often the impact appears to be OK because they check the mails I send them pretty quickly anyway but this extra emphasis gets the results.
When sending an email to someone who is not in my team I very, very, rarely use the important button because important is a subjective assessment. Things that I consider important in my role may be of minor importance to other people in the organisation.
I also see people using the subject to highlight urgency. My normal reaction to this is that if it was urgent why use an unpredictable tool like email, pick up the phone to me.
So I will take from this to consider what I rank as important or urgent and weigh this against other peoples view.
The Sunday Lunch Project Manager
