#452: Pecking orders

Email is great because it makes all organisations flat. You can contact anyone foolish enough to equip you with their address. Email is awful for exactly the same reason: your inbox is quickly filled by the well-intentioned communications of legions of people -each message having largely the same level of priority.

Today’s invention aims to deal with information overload in an organisation. It does this by exploiting the established chain of command. The following rules would be embedded within one’s email client (which would need to know about the underlying organogram).

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You can send email to anyone but those messages which arrive in your inbox from people to whom you report, or who report to you directly, are given priority. In fact, a scale of priority is provided such that e.g. those who are three levels away from you (up or down) are assigned a third level of priority. You can see these (as headers only) but you can’t open them until after having dealt with all messages of priority one and two for example.

The other rule is that if someone at a high level in the organisation is demanding to contact you, his/her message will be treated as described above (potentially low priority) but automatically cc’d to your immediate ‘superior.’ This has the effect of ensuring that the chain of command is maintained and that one’s boss can boost the priority of this demand on your time if, he/she deems that appropriate, by emailing you about it ( with priority 1 ).

Email in support of management: what a revolutionary idea.

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