"Some of us may get an hour to review the last three days of email." 

That's what fourth-year med student James Mason told the PracticeLink team recently. He was one participant in the physician panel we heard from during our annual company meeting a couple of weeks ago.

He continued, "If your email literally has the terms that are useful to us, I might [find it in a] search. If you abbreviate a state, I may miss it. [You have to] have enough searchable terms when I have 200 outstanding emails." 

His comments shed light on the way some time-strapped med students, residents and practicing physicians approach their inboxes: triage-style. Emails don't get dealt with in the order they arrive. Rather, only the messages with the most pressing contents get tended to. The rest must wait.

So how can you ensure your messages get seen and attended to? Here are a few tips I gleaned from the panel's discussion.

The other day I was catching up with a friend over brunch, and she was telling me about her job. “I feel like my whole job is sending emails,” she said. “I send emails all day." 

As an email marketer I found this particularly funny. I didn’t want to be a one-upper, so I refrained from stating I literally do often send emails all day. It’s not exactly my whole job, but it’s a big chunk.

My fellow PracticeLinker Cameron and I just got back from catching Pokémon in downtown Louisville on our lunch break. Though Pokémon GO has been around for just two weeks, you’ve probably already heard of this popular iPhone and Android game. (I would tell you how many times the app has been downloaded, but the number’s increasing by 1,500 people every 30 seconds.) If you haven’t yet created an account yourself, I’d bet you’ve at least seen a few people walking around your town, phones in hand, hunting Pokémon.