Urgent is not Important

The way that we communicate has changed significantly over the last few years and part of that change has meant that communication has become faster and more intense and significantly more inaccurate.

In the effort to move us from a passive state to one of active involvement the language used in communications, especially advertising and online media has become much more emotional, much more pressing and much less clear!

ACT NOW it said on the envelope and when I opened it up it was junk mail from a junk mail provider. I quickly recycled the paper and got on with life. URGENT documents inside - turns out it was my Broadband bill, not due for weeks.

How do we, on a day to day basis judge the difference between the important, the urgent and the mundane? I think the answer lays with how we communicate with our colleagues, how we send our communication. Exampleship.

Some years ago, while I was running my IT practice, I had a client request that all of their emails went out as URGENT. That every email had a read receipt etc. My advice then was that if you mark everything you send as urgent, people receiving the communication will by default edit out the urgency.

The same happens now, did you know that Microsoft Outlook and Thunderbird mail clients both have a low priority email setting? It's true, I actually have used it before as it adds an icon to the side of the email with an arrow pointing down and it - oddly - get's a faster response than the Urgent priority.

What if we started to actively grade our online communication, help people to prioritise our internal communications by downgrading the mundane.

What is the difference between important and Urgent. Urgent should be used only when the issue at stake is time sensitive with a definite pressing (soon) expiry and that missing this expiry will have a significant cost.

Your offer may be very good, but it is not urgent, it is not even, let's be honest here, important to the recipient. Overusing the word urgent reduces it's impact for when we need it. Urgent, I can't transfer the wages to the bank is usually Urgent and rightly so should be treated thus.

Important does not have to have a timeframe involved and does not need the recipient to do anything. Important Dave is off next week. Could be important, especially if Dave is a key member of staff. However it's not important to everyone and it's essential to differentiate.

The best practice is to avoid these words entirely. Allow that your recipient can understand your need sufficiently to respond in a timely manner.

On that note. Maybe a grumpy old man thing. In all email clients there are three types of field for sending emails to. The To field is the person or persons who need to action the email. The CC field is for the people who need to know that it's being actioned but don't need to do anything themselves. The BCC field is used to copy in someone secretly - though be careful with this - they still have the power to reply all!

To Summarise: It's Important and Urgent that you try and avoid using Urgent and Important and all these other words in your communication if you need it to be clear.