

I banned email at my startup - thomasknoll
http://medium.com/life-at-primeloop/putting-email-in-its-place-27757946d9fe

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comptly
Disclaimer: I work for @thomasknoll.

This was a huge plus when I decided to join the company. I've never been more
productive and less distracted. I get to focus on work, instead of a daily
deluge of emails some of which inevitably get lost.

Another benefit of moving this all to Slack, for me, is that the team
communicates way more transparently than I've seen at any other company. We're
plugged into what is going on (if we want to be), and the politics of "who is
on what email thread" essentially evaporates. I use private messages on slack
sometimes for super-sensitive stuff, but that's only happened a few times
since I came on board.

Biggest downside? It's gonna suck if I ever have to take a job at a company
with entrenched email culture :-(.

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jacquesm
Interesting approach. How would you propose to interface with the rest of the
world where not having email is about as strange as not having a fax was a
decade ago?

    
    
      - customers
     
      - prospects
    
      - end users
    
      - recruiting
    
      - registrars
    
      - suppliers
    

That's a genuine question, I'd love to get off the email treadmill completely
and just getting rid of the corporate component would be great.

I see that you're still doing 'email for external communications' but that's
where the pain point lies for me, internal is manageable.

~~~
thomasknoll
I answered something similar generally below to exelius. But, to answer a few
of your specific examples:

\- 90% of customer conversations occur via Intercom.io our hello@primellop
address and all reply-to’s point there. And, generally the other 10% that come
directly to me where it makes sense to have the rest of the team available to
help, get cc’d into hello@ in my response.

\- currently all our recruiting is inbound (mostly through angel.co) and I
follow up with people there to schedule a call. Certainly some amount of
external email around that.

\- on the sales front we are definitely using email. Happy to play in their
world and make it easy for them. But, again, most next actions and internal
collaboration/communication moves to trello/hackpad/relateIQ

\- all the services we use obviously send a bunch of email, that we sometimes
need to respond to. But all of that is in a group email that most of us can
dig through if we need to.

And, FWIW, I’ve had the opposite experience with email. I can handle the
external communication OK… it’s the mess of internal email that has caused the
most headaches.

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byoung2
The pain points you list about email are the same ones we're addressing with
our startup MorphMail. Because email cant do everything we want it to, we end
up using several tools. MorphMail is an attempt to make a tool that handles
multiple use cases elegantly. Check it out at
[https://www.morphmail.com](https://www.morphmail.com) and get on the list to
join our beta!

~~~
thomasknoll
Thank you! Checking it out now.

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nanoscopic
How do you keep track of performance metrics for tasks? I used trello at a
previous job, and had issues when there are many tasks, ensuring that tasks
are actually getting done in reasonable amounts of time.

I personally liked having lots of checkbox subtasks on trello tasks to show
continuing progress, but no one else at the company used that feature.

~~~
thomasknoll
For each area of the business we have two boards: planning and current. The
planning board gets pretty messy, and is the place where we capture all the
ideas that come to mind, comments and input are added to help prioritize those
ideas as a must-get-to-next-week, or someday-this-would-be-nice. And the
current board is the chunk of cards we are committing to getting done this
week "no matter what". So, the current board stays pretty clean, and people
work real hard to get everything cleared out of there each week, because then
we can go to the planning board and grab some of the other high-priority
things and check them off.

It isn't perfect, but it does keep us making forward progress. And sometimes
those things that just don't ever make it to the current board are things that
don't really need to get done.

~~~
nanoscopic
Where I was at we had a planning board and that was fine for incoming work.
Tasks that could be done within a couple of days were fine as well; we did
have a sort of 'current' board. The difficulty was only really for long
running tasks that took more than a week.

From the way you are describing it typically the current board was emptied
each week? New tasks were only brought in at the beginning of the week?

Did you break down larger tasks into chunks that could be handled within one
week? If so, how did you track progress within multi-month projects if they
were broken down into small pieces?

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exelius
How do you manage communication with people outside your company? Many of us
are in roles that require us to communicate with people both internal and
external to our organizations. Many of the external people I deal with would
not be willing to use an additional tool just to communicate.

~~~
thomasknoll
Good point. And we do still use email for external communication. But, even on
those messages that then require internal communication and decision making or
any next-actions, we shift the communication over to slack/trello/hackpad to
get the work done and then reply back externally.

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nebyoolae
The title is somewhat misleading (it's catchy, though), but I agree with your
points and think that while email is still a great catch-all communication
tool, there are better ones when you're actually trying to work in a team on
many projects.

~~~
thomasknoll
I was trying to decide whether to add, "and you won't believe what happens
next!!?!" to the end. But, I decided to keep it simple.

I certainly don't mean to be misleading. But, it definitely feels as extreme
as completely banning email. At least for our team, all our past experience
with hating email at a company was tied to internal email culture and the
inability to actually do work.

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alexisnorman
Though we haven't banned email at the startup I work for, we have a very
similar communication process (Slack, Trello and Pivotal Tracker). Makes
things feel a lot more productive and personable with one another.

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porterhaney
How do you manage official communications internally? Announcements, HR, etc?

~~~
thomasknoll
Slack is the main “channel” for all of that type of information. And/but, I
would say, 80% of the time, it is a link to a longer post in hackpad with more
details, and a request for comment.

------
thomasknoll
aaand we’ve never been happier. =)

