I’ve been sitting on the fence for a while now, and it’s time for me to take a stand:
I hate e-mail priority flags. I think they’re stupid and rude.
There! I said it.
When you send me an e-mail with a little priority flag, you’re not telling me that the message is important to me. You’re telling me that it’s important to you, and that you think that it should also be important to me. But it might not be. It might be mundane.
And a special note to my former co-worker whose response to my “please stop sending me stupid forwarded messages” was “if you don’t want to read it, you can delete it:” no message that contains the phrase “OMG this is so funny” deserves a priority flag, no matter how hard you laughed.
If Microsoft really cared about making e-mail more user friendly, they’d allow me to flag my own messages as a priority as easily as you can tell me that it ought to be. Who cares what you think my priorities ought to be?
Just say no to priority flags, people. Fight the power.
Honestly. What’s next? The government listening in on my phone calls … and offering grammatical advice afterwards? Yeesh.
P.S. Ray offers the following video response:
Tags: death, flags, fun, funny, government, microsoft, priority, Ray, video, work
Hmmm… I’ll have to ponder this. I use priority flags for business purposes when it is something that is truly urgent (as I am my boss’s sole source of organization it is important for him to realize that he has a pressing issue from time to time). However, I can see that if they are used indiscriminately that they might amount to an email version of “crying wolf.”
I never use them. They are another pointless Microsoft invention, like Word 2007 for XP/Vista (which is another subject altogether).
I think a more effective way to get someone to read you e-mail is to put “Read me, dammit” in the subject line. Stupid little icons don’t get people’s attentions. Then again, Bill Gates and company likes shiny little things.
I’m in an office where they are abused and at times actually used properly. What I really hate is that when people forward the message, and we have a lot of compulsive forwarders here, is that the priority flag stays with the message! Sure it was important from the original sender to recipient, but we don’t all need a little red exclamation point in our inboxes when we’re 6th or 10th down the e-mail chain.
I judge you when you prioritize your outgoing messages.
@ Michael: I think you get a pass if your job actually is prioritizing things for other people. The problem I have is when people whose job it is not use it as a way to try to set my priorities for me.
@ Shin: I actually like Word 2007! I mean, if you’re going to use a memory-hogging, corporate behemoth like the Office Suite, I much prefer the 2007 version to its predecessor. I tried to do OpenOffice, but unless you’re using it on every machine you own, there are too many computability issues.
@ Brian: Word.
I totally agree! My aunt always sends me pictures of her new grandbaby with a priority flag. The baby is cute and everything, but not a priority.
I also have to agree with Shin on the new Word for Vista. I hate it. Same goes for PowerPoint. The toolbars are set up in a way that don’t make sense, especially after you’re used to the previous versions.
Maybe I’m along on being pro-Word 2007, but I like the new interface. On the other hand, I absolutely hated the old interface and threatened on multiple occasions to expel my computer through a window for being unable to, for example, turn smart quotes on and off.
PowerPoint, on the other hand, remains the surest sign of Satan’s existence known to humankind. Interface be-damned, it’s the fact that I now have to condense whatever I’m saying into bullet points and provide a copy of the presentation to people in the audience … I mean, PowerPoint just makes you stupid. The next educational overhaul bill should ban it from all K-16 classrooms nationwide, and for breaking that law I might be willing to get over my opposition to the death penalty!