Email is never urgent. Really.

Senders

Email is never urgent? "But I can mark is as urgent" I hear you saying.

So what?

All that really does is place a little red exclamation mark next to the message in your recipient's mailbox. (Or some other indicator, depending on the mail program your recipient uses.) It certainly doesn't cause your email to arrive any quicker. It doesn't move it to the head of some line, or do anything other than maybe give your recipient a visual cue that you think what you're saying is important.

And it certainly doesn't avoid any email delays.

So again, I say: so what?

The fact is, if you need someone to get your message in minutes, then email's the wrong tool. If what you need to communicate is urgent and needs to be disseminated quickly, you can't count on email. You can use it, and "most of the time" it'll be fine ... but you can't count on it. I guarantee that at some point an urgent message will be delayed when you least expect it - and it won't be a mail system failure at all.

Email is what's called a "store and forward" system. When you send an email, it's received by a mail server, stored for some period of time, and then forwarded on to the next server in the path to get your email to your recipient. Finally it lands on the recipients mail server, where it's stored until the recipient downloads it (another kind of "forward" to their inbox), or reads it on-line.

Those "periods of time" that a server might hold on to your message before forwarding it are typically very short, but there's really no guarantee that they will be. There could easily be any of a number of legitimate different mail server delays along the path that your email will take to get to your recipient. That's not the system being broken, that's how the system works.

And of course on top of that, your recipient could simply be choosing to check email less frequently than you might need.

One of the huge benefits of email is that it puts the recipient in control of when they might want to read and/or deal with their incoming message. That's not something you as a sender can count on, or change. Instead, you need to deal with it.

If something is truly urgent, then pick a more appropriate tool. Perhaps instant messaging, perhaps a phone call, perhaps a walk down the hall. All of these are "real time" direct communication, with no multiple step storage delays involved.

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Recipients

Actually, that whole section for the senders was really for you. Why? Because you, too, need to know that email should never be relied on to be a "real time" communications tool.

And that realization, my friends, is very, very freeing.

The reason I absolutely love email is very simple:

• When I send email, I get to write it when I feel like writing it, and my recipient gets to read it when they feel like reading it. I'm not intruding or interrupting what they might otherwise be doing.

• When someone sends me mail, I get to read it when I feel like reading it. I can choose to, or choose not to, depending on whatever else is going on in my life. And I get to choose when, how or even if to reply.

Email really puts both sender and recipient in positions of control, as long as they realize that the cost of that control is the potential delay between sending and reading.

Why do I call this so "freeing" for recipients?

Be cause you get to choose.

You choose when, how, and what to send, you choose when to read, and you choose when, how and wether to reply. It's all in your control.

And yet, for something that you have so much control over, many people feel enslaved by their email, feeling that they having to read quickly and respond to everything. That's simply not true. You don't need to be constantly checking email (unless you want to), and you don't need to reply to everything (whether or not you want to).

You choose.

Let's put it this way: you wouldn't use email to call 911 for a life-threatening emergency, and neither should the people sending you email.

So why act like email is that time critical? Why choose to deal with email as if it were a real time communications tool, when by its very definition it cannot be?

Let it go.

Read your email. Reply to your email. Send your email. But do it on your terms and your schedule, not someone else's.

You choose.

So what if it the situation really is that important? What if it really is a 911-like situation where they need you now?

Email's not the right answer, regardless of how you use it.

They'll find another way to reach you.

They might even pick up the phone.