July 14, 2009

Get Rid of Email In Favor of Proper Communication Tools: Boost Productivity and Reduce Your InBox

In an article for HyperOffice an online communication tool for email, documents and more Shahab Kaviani and James Gaskin substantially make the case that most of us are using email as the ONE tool for ALL our communication needs.

Doing this causes us to receive too many emails, create inefficient uses of our time and live in a frustrated and revolving wheel of "keeping up".

Gaskin and Kaviani write that Rather than stretching email as a one size fit all tool, a vastly more productive approach is to use online collaboration tools. Unlike the email approach, where all data is treated uniformly, and jammed inside the inbox, online collaboration tools appreciate that different information needs within an organization need different treatment - task management, document management, schedule coordination, and many others. When each type of information is handled optimally, a net positive effect flows from it in terms of employee productivity and business efficiency. Recent studies have also supported online collaboration as a technology which will witness great growth. According to a March 2009 Forrester report on software-as-a-service, online collaboration is set to be one of the hotter areas of adoption. Forrester previously estimated the enterprise Web 2.0 collaboration market will hit $1.8 billion by 2013.

There are many things we do within email that would be best.

For example, making appointments. Instead of having 30 emails trying to scheduling a conference call with 10 people, why not use an online scheduling tool like Timebridge?

Instead of sharing documents via email, why not use a tool like HyperOffice, Box.net or many other such services.?

Read the full article for better insight into how to use email and other tools more effectively so you STOP drowning in a flood of email.

tags: collaboration , document management , email | 0 comments