This post is the result of reading a bit of advice in one of my RSS feeds today from one of the leading and most respected blogs on the Internet. In itself the information could be considered trivial but the potential for career disaster or personal embarrassment for anyone suffering from email overload ( and that must be many of us) was immense. It got me quite incensed, maybe this is the engineer/researcher in my makeup, but everything needs to be considered in the cold light of day for its real worth.

The post in question was quite simply about prioritising email using rules, whether this is an Outlook, Thunderbird, Gmail, Hotmail, Yahoo Mail or your favorite email program. In this particular instance the advice was that emails sent directly to you are more important than emails sent to a group.

My instant response is why!

The suggestion is that an email sent to you rather than a group can only be answered by you and is therefore more important. That seems to be a blindingly narrow and wrong view of emails in general.

Let me a give a simple example:

An email sent directly to you (as a junior line manager) from someone else in your firm says:

SICK LEAVE - COMPANY POLICY

Dear xxxx,

I have amended my timesheet to show 1 hours sick leave instead of holiday as agreed and in accordance with company policy.

A second email to a group of managers says:

SICK LEAVE - COMPANY POLICY

All line managers should be aware that if xxxx Health & Safety legislation regarding sick leave is not adhered to both the line manager and the company could be liable to criminal or civil prosecution. This is covered in an update to company policy which can be viewed here xxxxxxx.

OK so this is a contrived situation but if you were filtering on the basis of importance being that the email was addressed only to you then you may have missed the critical email. The problem with filters like this is that they have make you believe that they work, otherwise why would you have set it up?

So maybe in the end you will have read both emails but if you are under pressure maybe this is the email that keeps going to the bottom of the unread pile until it is deleted or too late.

This is just one simple example relating to some advice on filtering emails but you need to think about the wider implications of any Internet (or other) advice you read and decide to follow. Do you ever check your spam filters and find something that should not have been caught - how often does something get past the filters that is obviously spam to a human reader? There is nothing wrong with setting email rules, I use them all the time and they are very useful. I am saying don’t overly rely on them.

While this post is directly rated to email there are many other instances where similar things may happen using technology and software applications e.g relying on a desktop search program to find important documents and not including all directory paths to these documents.

So My Ten Tips Are:

1. There is nothing wrong with the concept of IT and software only how it is developed and how it is used.
   
2. Think through what you are doing, make sure you have set up any program and options properly
   
3. If you set up rules in any application (not only email) be prepared for them to fail either because the rules maybe imperfect or because the application may have shortcomings/bugs therefore: Analyse the risks of the program not doing what you intend Analyse the risks of having set things up incorrectly
   
4. Check what you have set up works correctly as best as you can
   
5. Find ways to reduce any risk - for example in Outlook you can set the view to show the first few lines of the email or use the preview pane
   
6. Don’t believe everything you read on the Internet or anywhere, sometimes people make mistakes are or just careless
   
7. Question in your own mind whether the information really makes sense
   
8. Do some research - there are plenty of other sources you can refer to with a simple Internet search
   
9. Don’t let GTD (Getting Things Done) get in the way of doing things right.
   
10. If the risks are too high don’t take them!!!!
    

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This entry was posted on Wednesday, April 16th, 2008 at 8:42 pm and is filed under Hints & Tips. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.