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Is every single email really "high importance"? I get a few of them from people at work (who are in different departments) who mark every single one of their emails as "high importance". Is it possible that people abuse this feature? Lol
Most of the emails are not of "high importance" at all. I almost never use this feature but everyone else seems to use it on a regular basis. Just curious if anyone deals with this in their workplace? I find it the same thing as people who abuse the "reply all" button
Importance is in the eye of the beholder. Maybe to them, each communication really is the most important thing they can think of at that moment?
I hear you on the "reply to all" though - nothing worse.
True, I see them as "drop everything youre doing and work on my request". Thats probably why. This woman sends the high importance email and then calls me to see if I read it.
That's the difficulty with e-mail, you can't tell if someone actually is considering your e-mail highly important unless they respond. I use that feature about 2-3 times a year, but don't know how others view it. I wouldn't have a problem calling after an e-mail for truly high important e-mails.
Location: East of Seattle since 1992, 615' Elevation, Zone 8b - originally from SF Bay Area
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The little boy who cried wolf effect would come into it for me. I get 100+ e-mails a day and don't remember the last time I got one marked highly important. When something is that urgent my boss or whoever it is will always come to my office in person.
I send out maintenance related emails from a shared Administrator email account to our internal user base(400-500 users globally). Most of these are relatively minor and can be ignored because they'll only apply to a few users(Creating a new account in the system for one site for example) but we have to notify all users because making the change to the system kicks all the users out for about 30 minutes. If you woke up the next day and saw the Maintenance Started and Completed emails, they can usually be ignored, but if you were awake, they're meaningful.
On some occassions, we need to actually have all the user read our emails. When a change results in a process change for everyone(a change in the link to connect to the system for example) they need to read that. Those are the only situations I use high importance.
I don't see it as a "Read this immediately" flag, rather as a "You're not going to want to miss this email" flag.
Call her on it. Unless she is a bigwig, there is nothing wrong with noting that you have to deal with many different tasks, and are forced to triage hers with everyone else's because she uses that button all of the time.
Call her on it. Unless she is a bigwig, there is nothing wrong with noting that you have to deal with many different tasks, and are forced to triage hers with everyone else's because she uses that button all of the time.
No she's not, I have actually been here longer than she has. She is requesting an invoice for the customer (so she says). I found out, it's only for her records. The customer already received what they needed when she requests these as "high importance". She just wants to have something on file. Not really urgent when I have other invoices that are actually needed because they wont ship without it.
Wait until you get a few in a short time spam. Then ask her to clarify which are of higher importance since she marked them all important. Maybe she'll get the hint.
If somebody always sends me stuff at high importance, I simply assume that none of them are important.
I use this feature 2-3 times/year, no more. I also make sure that everybody receiving the message really truly needs to know or respond.
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