Five Alternatives to Email (and Why Your Inbox Will Thank You)
Prognosticators have been predicting the death of email for decades, but it is still our go-to method of business communication. There are reasons for this. It's easy. It's ubiquitous. And most significantly, it is asynchronous. (Though, in many companies, the culture dictates answering emails immediately, which makes the asynchronicity moot.)
Collectively, we have had email fatigue for almost as long as we have had email. The only way to change that is to, well, change it.
Email fatigue is not just an annoyance. It has real consequences for how findable your information is. When every conversation, file share, quick question, and status update lands in the same inbox, a few predictable things happen:
You get overwhelmed. The inbox becomes a to-do list, a filing cabinet, and a chat log all at once, and none of those jobs get done well.
You archive things you shouldn't have to. When the inbox gets too full, the instinct is to clear it out, whether that means deleting, archiving, or shoving things into folders you'll never open again. Important information gets buried right alongside the noise.
You can't find what actually matters. A crowded inbox buries the important emails in a sea of unimportant ones. Everything looks the same at a glance.
You end up relying on search — which relies on your memory. If you can't scroll to find something, you search for it. But search only works if you remember the right subject line, the right sender, or the right phrase someone used eight months ago. That's a lot to ask of your memory.
None of this is a personal failing. It's what happens when one tool is asked to do six different jobs. Happily, there's a fix. If you route communication to the right channel in the first place, your inbox only has to hold what actually belongs there.
Here are five alternatives for email.
Cloud-based documents
Shared documents (like Google Docs) are great for collaboration. They have built-in version control mechanisms, always live in one place, and can be accessed by multiple people at once. Different permission levels can be set so that some people can edit, some can comment without making edits, and some can only read. Best of all, the conversation about the document happens in the document — as comments attached to the relevant section — instead of scattered across a reply chain you have to reconstruct later.
Chat
Chat channels, like Slack, are great for ephemeral conversations that don't necessarily need to be recorded for posterity. "What's the ETA on the [blank] file?" doesn't need to be an email that lives in your inbox forever. Move the quick, low-stakes back-and-forth to chat, and your inbox stops filling up with messages that were never meant to be permanent records in the first place.
Intranet
Not every company needs an intranet, but if you have one, it's a good way to share information company-wide. Because it's pull communication (rather than push, like email), it's important to train employees that it is their responsibility to check the intranet for any new communications. Make sure you have policies and permissions in place for updating information. Once it is out-of-date, it's no longer trusted or useful.
Most importantly, make sure the intranet contains information your employees both need and want. Otherwise, it won't get used — and if it isn't used, everything just goes back to email anyway.
Self-service channels
Self-service channels reduce one-to-one transactions. FAQs work best for areas that deal with a lot of repeat and routine questions, like IT or call centers. Wikis can house procedures, knowledge maps, and project roadmaps so employees can answer those questions for themselves rather than email. Every question that gets answered by a wiki page is one less email sitting in someone's inbox waiting to be dealt with, filed, or forgotten.
Training to reduce the number of questions asked
Similarly, a lot of emails come down to poor training. If your employees have to ask about routine tasks, they may need better training. It might be worth looking at your on-boarding process to reduce the number of emailed questions you're fielding. Fewer routine questions means fewer routine emails, which means the emails that do land in your inbox are more likely to be the ones that actually need your attention.
Bringing It Back to the Inbox
None of these six alternatives are about eliminating email entirely. Much as we may hate it, email isn't going anywhere, and it's genuinely well-suited to plenty of communication. But every conversation you move to chat, every question you answer with a wiki page instead of a reply, and every review you run through comments in a shared doc instead of a chain of emails is one less thing competing for space in your inbox.
That adds up. A lighter inbox is easier to keep organized, easier to actually read, and far less likely to end up as a graveyard of half-remembered subject lines you're hoping search will resurrect for you. The goal? An inbox that only holds what belongs there in the first place.
If your team's inbox has become the place where every kind of communication goes to get lost, contact Entrelac — let's talk about routing your communication to the tools built for it.
