IMPORTANT: e-mail priority
2009-04-05
A vast proportion of the e-mail I've ever seen sent high priority was from HR people. I'm not claiming that HR e-mail isn't important but it does seem that everyone else has a different idea of what's high priority.
[Worth noting at this point that I think Outlook calls the flag high/low importance rather than urgency (don't know, not got Outlook on this machine). An urgency flag would be more useful in my opinion, one of each would be better still, but none of it is any use unless everyone can be realistic about when to set them]
A great example came the other day. One of the core technology guys sent round an e-mail warning that we definitely shouldn't try and reboot anything at the moment because it might not come back up intact. This is important and urgent news; I don't know quite how badly broken things might have been but we're definitely talking about a sizeable chunk of lost time for each person who doesn't get the warning.
By comparison, we had a warning from HR that some small part of their computer system was being made unavailable for a while so it could be worked on. It's one of those features that you might look at once but would certainly wouldn't need often, nor in an emergency. This e-mail was sent high priority, with the word 'important' in block caps in the subject.
Perhaps everything is highly important when you're in HR. They do some important stuff, like recruiting and making sure we get paid. The other teams do important stuff too, but I think there's a tendency for technical people to assume that there's always something that could go more wrong, and always good reason to save that priority flag for when it's even more relevant.
I dread to think what could happen to get a 'High Priority' mail out of some of those guys.
[Worth noting at this point that I think Outlook calls the flag high/low importance rather than urgency (don't know, not got Outlook on this machine). An urgency flag would be more useful in my opinion, one of each would be better still, but none of it is any use unless everyone can be realistic about when to set them]
A great example came the other day. One of the core technology guys sent round an e-mail warning that we definitely shouldn't try and reboot anything at the moment because it might not come back up intact. This is important and urgent news; I don't know quite how badly broken things might have been but we're definitely talking about a sizeable chunk of lost time for each person who doesn't get the warning.
By comparison, we had a warning from HR that some small part of their computer system was being made unavailable for a while so it could be worked on. It's one of those features that you might look at once but would certainly wouldn't need often, nor in an emergency. This e-mail was sent high priority, with the word 'important' in block caps in the subject.
Perhaps everything is highly important when you're in HR. They do some important stuff, like recruiting and making sure we get paid. The other teams do important stuff too, but I think there's a tendency for technical people to assume that there's always something that could go more wrong, and always good reason to save that priority flag for when it's even more relevant.
I dread to think what could happen to get a 'High Priority' mail out of some of those guys.
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