The blog

Today, I’m back in Gothen­burg after two days in Therese Albrechtson’s and Gustaf Oscarsons’s enjoy­able com­pa­ny. I had the plea­sure of being respon­si­ble for the first of nine keys in Acad­e­my of Excel­lence, the train­ing pro­gram for own­ers of rapid­ly grow­ing com­pa­nies that Therese and Gustaf have start­ed. It was a priv­i­lege for me to work with the high­ly devot­ed par­tic­i­pants, who were lead­ers with the goal to sig­nif­i­cant­ly expand their businesses.

Which email first?

One of the top­ics in my talk was pri­or­i­ti­za­tion. Entre­pre­neurs and oth­er ​“doers” often have a ten­den­cy to eas­i­ly start new things, get new ideas and some­times there­by get more to do than is pos­si­ble to manage.

Also, the sheer amount of emails often becomes a prob­lem. Recent­ly, Google launched (in beta) a new fea­ture to Gmail, ​“Pri­or­i­ty Inbox”, which will help you pri­or­i­tize your incom­ing mail. The email that Gmail inter­prets as impor­tant, is put in a sep­a­rate ​“Pri­or­i­ty Inbox” and the remain­der will remain in the reg­u­lar inbox. Grad­u­al­ly, you can train in Gmail to make more and more cor­rect pri­or­i­ti­za­tions, they say.

Me, I’m curi­ous­ly hesitant

Is this the future, that our mail client itself pri­or­i­tizes among our incom­ing emails? Yes, it is in itself an attrac­tive idea. But, unless we ignore the rest of the emails and just focus on the auto­mat­i­cal­ly pri­or­i­tized, the ben­e­fit will only be that the ​“urgent selec­tion” of the top­most pri­or­i­tized emails will be done more swift­ly than today. As long as we still choose to also review and con­sid­er the non-pri­or­i­ty mail, the amount of mail to process is not reduced.

So, for me, this is an inter­est­ing fea­ture, but I’m not sure that it solves our prob­lem with all these emails.

What do you think?

Please leave a com­ment. I’m curi­ous to hear what you think in this matter.