Do you send out one line emails? Do you send out emails that don’t have content, just a subject line? Do you try to use email for conversations with a group?

Why you need to stop

Email is an amazing system with many advantages but it’s a total fail when people attempt to use it improperly. Here are some of the reasons put forward by Scott Young:

1. Email is one-to-one
   Although you can use Reply to All and mailing lists, email works best between two people. This means group conversations are difficult to continue.

2. Email is time-delayed
   Conversations work best when there is a rapid flow of feedback. If your messages are hours or days apart, this makes chatting difficult.

3. Email is Bloated
   People already get too many emails. Adding to that pile lengthy conversations means your messages will get ignored or skimmed.

Email as a Chat method

Multiple single line requests and comments can quickly overwhelm our systems and risk important information being missed. There are good alternatives to using email for chat.

Using Email as a Conversation method
Email ‘conversations’ between a group of people CCed to an email thread quickly bloat our inboxes and are typically not read after the first or second iteration. There are some excellent alternatives to using email for conversation within a group.

Using Email as a ‘reminder’ method
I had one person complain that he hadn’t received the ‘reminder’ email for an event. When I asked him what he meant (because the event invite had been sent out the week before), he actually explained that he likes to receive reminder emails so they appear at the top of his email page. In other words, he’s treating his in-box as a list of chronological reminders to himself. This explains why he sends out so many emails every week! It also reveals that he too gets so many emails, he never makes it onto the second, and subsequent, pages of his inbox. Using email for this purpose contributes to bloat and there are a variety of alternatives for this.

The first emails were sent in the 1960s but email as we know it today began in 1995. In the Goodwin Creative offices we receive over a hundred emails per day. And a good 30% of our time daily is spent sorting through these emails, sorting through requests, and making sure everyone gets our full attention. 

What you can use instead

FOR GROUPS

If you are a social, political, or professional group that likes to use email but finds it a fail for all the above reasons the best alternatives are:

Google Groups are the best of all worlds

• A google group will allow you to manage an Email List for members (without needing mailchimp etc).

• Group members can choose to receive individual emails, email digests, or no emails at all 

• You can see all email conversations by visiting the group page

• To belong to a google group, you do not need any kind of membership, gmail, facebook, etc. You can simply send your emails to the group email, and it will be received by everyone in the group. This is great for conversation, announcements, and more.

• To set up a google group, click here - https://support.google.com/groups/answer/2464926?hl=en

Slack can be amazing

Slack is a collaborative platform that allows all kinds of conversation and messaging. It has a web-based and an app-based version, you can easily sort conversations into channels, trade images back and forth, set up to-do lists, and quite frankly, we couldn’t function today without Slack. Goodwin uses it all day long collaborating with partners, subcontractors, and clients. As well, we use slack for political groups, an online newsmagazine, and to ask for more toilet paper in an office-share. Slack is awesome.

The only drawback with Slack is that some people simply can’t sort it. I haven’t been able to figure out why, but it is what it is. You can get started with Slack here - https://slack.com/intl/en-ca/

Facebook Messenger and What’s App

These two ‘chat’ platforms work well, but one needs to have accounts and a growing number of people are concerned about privacy - both these apps are owned by Facebook. While we might use these apps for family and/or social conversations, we avoid using them to converse with clients.

Signal

New kid on the block Signal is similar to Messenger and What’s App but it is unaffiliated with Facebook. Many political groups use Signal because of privacy concerns. The Signal website describes itself thusly: State-of-the-art end-to-end encryption (powered by the open source Signal Protocol) keeps your conversations secure. We can't read your messages or listen to your calls, and no one else can either. Privacy isn’t an optional mode — it’s just the way that Signal works. Find out more here - https://signal.org/en/

FOR CLIENTS

When working with clients, collaboration is important and this can lead to a lot of back and forth messaging. And each client has their own preferred method of text communication. It’s actually quite astonishing how many clients communicate almost entirely with their phones. Here are some of the methods we’ve started incorporating into our work mechanisms:

Honeybook
This project management platform allows us to keep all emails from a client and project in one place. We’ve just started using the system over the past few months, and so far it’s working satisfactorily. We still prefer Slack if possible for chat communication, but if that’s not possible, Honeybook will keep track of emails for us to be sure we don’t miss anything. 

However, Honeybook presents emails one after another like a toilet-paper-roll. There is no way to sort, or check off, anything. In fact, even replying to emails on Honeybook is cumbersome. 

Slack is amazing

For all the reasons listed above, we absolutely prefer Slack for client collaboration purposes. Here are some further benefits:

No time delay - during work hours, we have our Slack channels open and are able to respond to requests and comments very quickly.

Privacy - our client slack channels are totally private. Only persons in the channel can see messages. 

Threads and Check Offs - it’s possible to sort conversations into threads, and it’s possible to ‘check off’ items that have been seen and dealt with. One can’t get more organized than this!

Available on your phone, your tablet or your computer - people can install the Slack App anywhere they need it and it’s all synced. Talk when you’re in a line up and using your phone, or send ideas while sitting in a waiting room. It all goes to the same place.

So what about email then?

Email remains the  most used, and best understood method of communication in modern times. But in order to manage your personal, social and company email, and not get overwhelmed by bloat, you need to schedule time on a daily basis. It is part of Goodwin’s morning routine to check our email accounts. We use a combination of Honeybook and Clickup to help sort and track correspondences. BTW, we highly recommend Click Up for professional teams and it integrates well with Google Mail.

So keep using email, by all means! But when you have the urge to send out a one-liner, we suggest you pause for a moment. Is it possible to send this chat through a different method? Or could you wait a bit, collect all your thoughts, and put them into one email, rather than half a dozen?