What: suggest tags to prepend to TPG email list subject lines
Why: to improve response times, increase team trust, reduce team member stress
When: trial period from April 27 - May 26-ish
Option to checkin sooner if something is not working or if a better idea occurs to any of us
Finally: post on TPG wiki team page
"NEEDS RESPONSE" is pretty long to type, and will make a lot of the subject line not visible on mobile. But also, it doesn't distinguish between "Needs response right away" and "Needs response whenever you can get to it".
Would URGENT be more generally useful than NEEDS RESPONSE?
How should we handle something that is NR or URGENT for only one TPGer, but should be sent to the whole group?
As a side note, I do 70% of my email triage on my phone, and very often use the "mark unread, and return to inbox" button. I wish desktop gmail had a one-click button for that.
One way to do this is make use of the CC field. So, put the one TPGer in the 'to' field and add the team list in the CC field. By default, this might not have any effect on how the email will show up in your inbox, but you can set up mail filters to treat messages differently when you are in the 'to' field vs the 'cc' field. Not only does this take align with the semantic meaning of those fields, but a whole new world of taking different actions on your emails opens up.
@ksmith- thanks for identifying the use case!
+1 to Arthur's idea.
Also, a simple "@TPG- for your radar, NR from X" at the very top of the body of the email could help.
I have a different use case, "sanity check" or "validation". I need at least one person to respond, but it's not especially important who, and it needn't be everybody. Like a code review, I guess. "NEEDS 1 RESPONSE". "NEEDS1". "VAL". "SANITY".
@JAufrecht Maybe ANYONE for the case where you need any of us to weigh in?
@ggellerman Any comments on my earlier URGENT axis vs. NR? Do we need both NR and FYI, if they are opposites of each other? Or are they not opposites of each other?
I like ANYONE for needs feedback by at least 1 unspecified person.
I think (or at least, I theorize) that anything more than ten characters of priority information should go in the body of the email rather than in the subject, that the subject should have only a few keywords that can be used to triage at a glance.
URGENT is more specific than NR (which is an abbreviation I won't remember). It is true that we are trying to combine two axes or even three: urgency, scope of attention, and action required. But I wouldn't want to spell all of those out in the heading.
To recap and advance a straw person that blends all three axes into a short list:
FYI means low urgency (this week?), everybody should skim or read, nobody needs to respond
ANYONE means, medium urgency (today), everybody should at least check to see if somebody else responded
URGENT means high urgency (within a few hours), everybody should read and see if a response is necessary
Anything more complex would then go in the top of the body.
i like where all of this is heading. one clarifying question: do *all* emails to the list require that the subject line be preceded with one of these codes?
I like ANYONE or NEEDS +1 for emails where we want a second set of eyes.
@ksmith URGENT means urgent which I see as different from NEEDS ME TO DO SOMETHING, but both could be useful. I also think that seeing URGENT for things that are not urgent would dilute the word's power for me.
@JAufrecht If NR is not descriptive enough, then I am open to changing it. Would ACT work for this?
[FYI]
[ANYONE]
+1 to Grace that FYI implies the content is purely optional. If you don't get to it for a year, or if you simply delete it without reading it, that's OK.
@ggellerman If the issue is that you might not get to an email within a few days, then URGENT would seem to solve it. If it needs your input, but not within a few days, it would not get the URGENT tag. If it is something you should look at right away, even if your input or action is not required, then URGENT fits the bill.
Could you share a case or two where having a message tagged NR but not URGENT would help you?
@Awjrichards We should define what it means for an email to not have any tagging at all. And ideally it would be the case(s) that comprise 90% of what we do.
I'm not fond of the square brackets, because they look like (and in some cases will be alongside) mailing list identifiers. But I could be persuaded.
limit to 3-5 tags including
New proposal:
I made sure the page is a subpage of TPG rather than being a top-level page. Grace will verify that the content is OK, and then mark as done.