Work Rants

Today, a lady got a promotion. Let's call her Gretchen. I had dealings with Gretchen before, however they were not good. Gretchen needed some content in the portal I manage. Simple enough. Unfortunately, it was going to take some time to identify her stakeholders specifically. Impatience was wining over doing something right. They wanted to cram the content onto every employee's layouts - despite the fact that most of those employees would have no idea what this content was. At the time, I still had the quixotic notion that I could keep the portal relevant, compelling, and relevant. I pointed out that having that additional kind of noise in the portal was not a good thing. If we waited a week or two, I could set it up so the tab only went to the people who needed the content. They said tough shit - we'll do this now. Fast forward a year and we find their tab that had to be pushed to the entire employee population that didn't mean anything to them, complete with

Ack! The sky is falling! Donkeys are on fire! Children cannot find their mommy! So, I sent this message with high importance!  !  Blark! Almost every single message I get flagged with high importance is not important to me. It might be important to the person who sent it, but importance is subjective. In my opinion, if a message is not time sensitive in a relatively short time period, and it is not critical to either me or my bosses, it is not important - period. And, of course, important things are rarely urgent and urgent things are rarely important. Do not send me a meeting request with barely a title, much less an agenda, and is scheduled a month from now, marked as urgent. It just isn't. The option I do like to use, which I seem to be alone in using, is the low importance option. Some of us already consider all email to be low importance. But, I find this option to be a courteous indicator to the recipient that I am not trying to push my interpretation of importance on