The Ubiquity of Email: Use it to Get Organised

Sometimes it seems as though technology makes life more complicated instead of easier. Take e-mail for example. For many of us, e-mail is ubiquitous. We begin the working day at the same place and in very much the same way as we finish it: in our e-mail Inbox, checking, reading, answering and deleting messages.

Email is very obtrusive and it can be extremely annoying. The annoying e-mail messages are often from bosses, coworkers, friends or family, about things they want us to do.

As a result many of us use to-do lists. You can keep a gorgeous to-do list in a dedicated software program or on the Web. You can even print it out or create it with pen and paper. But whichever method you use has one significant drawback. To use a to-do list, you must maintain it, and this takes time, time you could be using to get more things done.

The ubiquity of e-mail, as it turns out, makes it a useful medium for a to-do list. Your e-mail client's inbox can be a to-do list that practically maintains itself and most likely will not get out of date. If you use your inbox as your to-do list, do not filter any messages automatically (except maybe those which are very unlikely to become to do list items; for example, mailing list messages). Instead, keep the messages in your inbox, so that they can remind you of the things you have to do. After you have completed a task, move the message (maybe with the help of a filter) to its final destination-another folder in your mail client. But some of us have very crowded e-mail Inboxes with lots of messages. While all e-mail messages are important, some are more important than others. Any mail from a friend is more important than twenty newsletters. Spam is not as valuable as the feedback from you. Any urgent message that requires immediate action is more important than a newsletter you can read later. The problem is that all e-mail messages appear to be equal.

The emails I write differ in importance also. The e-mail I write to a friend asking whether she'd like to join me hiking is more important than a nice site I forward to myself when I was working at another computer. An online survey is never as important as an e-mail about the online order of Christmas gifts I made.

Email has a feature that lets you tell your recipients how important your e-mail message is. Most e-mail clients allow you to set the message priority when you compose a message. Make use of this feature to indicate if an e-mail is of extraordinary importance and to indicate when a message is not that important.

The recipient's e-mail client will in some way indicate the importance you assigned to a message. Messages carrying highest importance might be bold or marked with red while less important messages are be grayed out or moved down the list, for example.

This information can help the recipient use e-mail more efficiently, especially if they are using their Inbox as a to-do list. Of course, the importance attached to a message does not show the recipient how important a message actually is to him or her, but it indicates how important it is for the sender, and that in itself communicates a lot.

Communicating the importance of a message is as important with e-mail as it is in face-to-face contact, and it is not much more difficult: assigning high or - even more important - low priority when you send a message is all it takes. A word of caution: do not assign all your emails, or even most of your emails, an urgent priority because your recipients will get into the habit of ignoring the message priority, if they do not agree with you. You do not want to be like the boy who cried wolf.

Indicating the relative importance of an e-mail message can help us all communicate better and work more efficiently. Since we cannot get away from e-mail, we might as well use it in a way that can help keep us more organised.