I've noticed that when I send or receive email marked with "Low Importance" it's actually another way to mark the email as particularly interesting. In essence, "It's low importance? Oh, then it's probably something personal or otherwise much more intriguing than a simple work-related message."
Do you read low importance messages before normal importance messages? Before high importance messages?
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I notice that, at work, the "High Importance" emails are usually something assinine like, "Take your ethics training before blah blah blah..." Gee, I guess I'm not ethical enough right now...I have to go through this ethical, altruistic transformation....Geez Louise! I hear you though, man. Email is abused too often. Especially in the work place.
I pay no attention to importance on emails. I used to work for a guy for whom everything he said he considered high importance, which of course made priority useless. Few if any people put a low urgency on messages. I collapsed the column and don't look at it. If people used it rationally it could be useful, but it seems mostly to rank ego, not urgency.
I totally agree with Aklewy. It ranks ego, not importance. Perfect way of summarizing it.
Perhaps because it's at Microsoft, where we write the software itself, most people (not all) generally mean it when they set something at high importance or low importance.
One of my co-workers who's particularly good about this will send high importance mail if there is a specifically time sensitive nature to the message and low importance mail if it's something like, "I'm not feeling well, so I'll be in late."
But thinking back to outside Microsoft, I'm inclined to agree about ego over urgency.
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