Forget Inbox Zero, go Zero Emails.
Or, How to finally get rid of work email.
TL;DR: new platform Workgroup, is replacing inefficient email (internal AND external), with faster and much more efficient real-time workgroups. Try it here.
For as long as anyone can remember, email has been the only text -based communication medium for work. For the vast majority of business users worldwide, this is still the case. Email is the absolute king of business communication, but there is a growing realization, that the emperor is actually not dressed very well for the mobile age…
So what’s so wrong with email anyway?
Email has one advantage. It’s super easy to write an email, with as long a story as you feel like, and as many people as you want on CC. Everyone’s on email, so you can be sure they gets the message (eventually), and (maybe) answer.
That’s also why email is so problematic. its far easier to generate work for others, then it is to actually read, action and answer the onslaught. Group email is worse, after about 5 replies, a conversation becomes such a mess, that everyone loses the plot.
But there is a bigger story here. The story of how we forgot to work together effectively, and became slaves to an endless to-do list that we do not control. In this environment, we are perfectly happy to send an email, and wait two day for a reply — for a small thing that could have been settled in seconds. And not because we don’t care, but because we do not have a better method of collaborating with the outside world efficiently.
Why now?
Email is beginning to loose it’s top position, and that’s a good thing.
The first erosion in Emails’ position came from 1:1 conversations. Practically all of us communicate with friends and family via messaging, not email, and this is rapidly becoming the case in business too. Bypassing email, people text, whatsapp, messenger, skype and even snapchat their business partners. It’s just simpler and faster. But it works mostly with contacts who are also friends, and it doesn’t scale very well, especially not to work groups.
The second erosion in Emails’ leadership is coming from team-collaboration apps. Using these correctly, reduces in-team email volume, but unfortunately, external emails remain untouched. In addition, they can be a bit noisy, demanding as much attention as email does.
Enter Workgroups.
A Workgroup is a term that defines a group of people working together on a specific task, or having an ongoing discussion — regardless if they are from the same company or not.
Think of it this way:
every email conversation you are on, which has people on CC, is actually a group of people trying to get something done — A Workgroup. It could be an internal workgroup building a product, or an external workgroup providing a service to you, or a client workgroup with some of your team and some of theirs.
What if, instead of connecting via numerous emails per project, you could simply message in a workgroup focused just on that subject?
That’s exactly what I’ve been doing in the last few months. As the founder and CEO of a company building a Workgroup application, I was dogfooding (using our own product to see how it feels) for the last few months, and these are the results:
As the CEO of a startup company, I’m now member of about 15 workgroups at any given time (dev, marketing, design and so on). When I still used email, this represented about 1,500 emails a week (!). Now that I switched to workgroups, I manage everything we do, internally and externally, in 15 real-time workgroups — and practically zero emails. And I’d never look back.
From Inbox Zero — to Zero Email.
The workgroup app allows you to take any subject that you would otherwise discuss with a group on email, and instantly (i.e in under 10 seconds) — open it as a workgroup.
Once you’ve done that, all the workgroup discussions are happening live, using real time messaging. Everyone can see the messages and files that are being exchanged, everyone can respond and participate, and things get done much better, and much faster — much more efficiently.
This is how I dropped from from 1,591 work emails the first week of March last year, to just 35 emails the same week this year? And I can guarantee you, I’m not less active, just more effective.
That’s it. It’s really that simple. And I hardly email anymore. I don’t have to.
To try it for yourself, jump right into the web app: web.workgroup.im
