Established 1776

With your help, we can raise $1,000,000 of awareness.

Where emails go to die

1 Star2 Stars3 Stars4 Stars5 Stars (6 votes, average: 4.33 out of 5)
Loading ... Loading ...

People who use flagging or another system to keep track of emails that need a response

People who trust their own memory and instincts to get them through the week

Here is one of the big office truths: we are all morons incapable of remembering the simplest things.  Seriously.  All of us forget no less than 27 things we’re supposed to do every day.  9,742 a day if you’re a big idiot.

Microsoft, in an uncharacteristic moment of brilliance, invented “flags” for emails. Granted, in a more characteristic moment of dumbassery, they decided to let you use 5 different colors of flags (and concluded that one color is best again in 2007), but the flag is a wonderful, wonderful, underutilized thing.

Flags say, “Hey dumbass, don’t forget about me,” without the nagging boldness of an unread email.  While several people use the “Mark Unread” technique, it is clearly inferior: I know you’ve read that email 132 times and had to mark it unread every time saying, “Oh yeah, that’s important, but not right now.  Let me hide it in a population of other emails that will look the same when I come back and try to find this one.”  The problem is that you can’t tell the difference between these unread emails and your legit unread emails, so you’re just playing pop-a-mole with your emails until you get over your laziness and actually do one of these things you’re being asked to do.

But there is another whole population of people who uses no method of flagging emails whatsoever.  They will read an email, intend to follow up on it, and will forget about it for the rest of their lives.  Like an ad for a charity.  Not using a system is a guarantee that 65% of the people you work with think you’re a forgetful moron.  The other 35% are just as checked out as you are.

Start using your email flags and set up a filter that shows you just flagged emails.  Not only will you thank me, but everyone else will too.  And you’ll probably get a promotion out of it because you’ll finally be doing something other than panning for email gold every time you open Outlook.

Share with other people:
  • Digg
  • Facebook
  • del.icio.us
  • Reddit
  • StumbleUpon
  • TwitThis
  • Sphinn
  • E-mail this story to a friend!

August 10, 2009 | Filed Under at work 

comments

3 Responses to “Where emails go to die”

  1. Garrett on August 10th, 2009

    Why do you need to flag emails when you have a secretary that prints your email, brings it to you, waits for you to handwrite a response on it, takes it back to her desk, and then types your response and sends it on your behalf?

    True f’ing person BTW.

  2. Evan on August 11th, 2009

    If I could, I totally would.

  3. Willton on August 16th, 2009

    Garrett, my boss is just like that.

Leave a Reply




  • subscribe to this blog



     Subscribe to RSS

    Subscribe with Bloglines

    Add to Google

    Add to Technorati Favorites

    why you are here...

    You are here because you are awesome and you celebrate awesomeness.

    You are here to read a new post every weekday.

    You are here because there are two types of people in the world: people who are here, and people who suck.