Alert me if it's urgent, don't if it's not

There is one advance in messaging that would be painfully simple, and I am dying to have, yet which no one seems to be offering. The problem is one of prioritizing and urgency: People don't want to be bothered and people don't want to bother each other. I want to be notified of a new message if it's urgent but don't if it's not. The problem is that there is currently no effective way to distinguish urgent messages from non-urgent ones.

How it would work

It's simple: Before someone sends a message (email, text message, phone call, whatever), they have the option to mark the message as urgent. A message sent as urgent would arrive in the receiver's inbox with all the usual attention grabbing screen flashes, vibrations, beeping noises, and color-changing icons. But if the sender did not opt-in to the urgent option, the message would slip silently into the receiver's inbox, awaiting a convenient time for the receiver to open it.

It could even go a step further by having senders select how soon the message should be read and the message would then get filed into the appropriate folder, but I am all for simplicity, and an urgent opt-in button seems simple enough to me.

Why current methods don't work

Up until now, the solution (if you can call it that) offered by most email services has been the exclamation point. That works fine to distinguish important from unimportant messages, but completely fails the urgency test because messages arrive with all the same attention grabbing stimuli whether or not it has an exclamation point.

People have tried workarounds like putting "URGENT:" in the subject line, or calling multiple times in a row. And people have tried avoiding distractions by shutting down their email or turning off their phones, but this leaves us vulnerable to missing truly urgent messages. Why should people have to settle for these imperfect alternatives when a much simpler and more effective method could be used?

Why does this not already exist?

My theory is that since messaging technology started out slowly without many users, there was no need to separate urgent from non-urgent messages since people never had the problem of being inundated with distracting messages. In the beginning, AOL's You've Got Mail was a sound welcomed with excitement and anticipation; customers enjoyed having all the stimuli that notified them of new messages, and messaging services were more than happy to provide them. But flash forward to 2009 and people are busier and more distracted than ever, and the number of messaging services has swelled to the point that cooperation between them has become difficult.

So are we doomed to a life of distracting messages? I doubt it, and in fact I predict this change will come within the next couple of years. As soon as Gmail or Yahoo! or another popular messaging service picks up this feature and people like it, it will spread like a virus.

...At least I hope so.