
A Company That Got Rid of Email - dsr12
http://www.fastcompany.com/3035927/agendas/inside-the-company-that-got-rid-of-email
======
jewel
This can be done without eliminating email altogether. Disable notifications
in your email program, and have it poll only manually.

This lets you respond to email at your own pace. For me, working through my
email once in the morning and once after lunch seems to be a good pace. My
coworkers quickly adapted, and will use an instant message or phone call if
something really needs immediate attention.

This might not be as easy for non-programmers, but for me it helps me get more
done since I can focus easier, which is ultimately what will keep my boss
happy. In more tricky environments, you may be able to configure filters so
that important emails _do_ send notifications.

Hopefully in the future we can all have a digital assistant that watches our
email for us and detects the level of urgency automatically.

~~~
calinet6
It's still a crutch that's supremely ineffective as a structure for doing what
needs to be done.

People keep telling me, "communication problems are impossible to solve, you
can just never get people to communicate perfectly. You need to accept that
communication problems will always exist."

I don't buy it.

When a system is ineffective at solving a structural problem, it's because the
system is not fit for the problem at hand.

A giant bucket where all of our notifications, important communications,
unimportant communications, and entirely irrelevant communications are dumped
is simply an ineffective structure over which to build an effective process.

I wholeheartedly agree with skipping the e-mail. Use a better system, get a
better process, and don't allow people to fall back on the ancient and wildly
unproductive crutch.

~~~
ObviousScience
Could you name a feature you think that email is lacking that you believe
another system provides?

Ed: Perhaps I was being glib, but my point is that the person made a nonsense
comment. I doubt anyone downvoting me can name something that email doesn't
have a relatively straightforward way to implement (with perhaps the exception
of IM, and only because of delay times). It's simply silly to think that /any/
system is going to let you deal with a large volume of messages a day without
having to filter and configure preferences, but I've legitimately not found a
replacement for email in terms of relying moderate sized chunks of information
to individuals or groups.

~~~
inovica
The biggest thing for me is when I send an email to someone with a 'task' I
find it's out of my head and passed over. The problem is follow-up. I
sometimes remember the task that I'd set and find that its not been done as
the other party has forgotten it. Its this that's the biggest thing for me

------
Animats
Look at their working environment. They have eight employees with laptops
sitting around a table. They had a total of twenty employees when they started
this. They're so tiny they don't need internal e-mail.

~~~
protonfish
I've worked like that and it's brutal. Maybe cubes aren't so bad.

------
jeena
Email is pull already, every email client can be configured to only pull
manually. I never had blinking icons or anything and never understood the
supposedly big problem with email communication. On the contrary I like it
because it is a asynchronous way of communicating. I answer emails when I have
the time to do so, not when someone calls and takes my attention.

~~~
unsignedint
I've moved to more of "pull" approach recently, and it seems to work pretty
well too. (I used to use on Gmail interface, but now I'm mostly on Gnus --
whenever I have moment to check my E-mail, I simply hit 'g' key to check to
see anything new.)

I still have notifications sent to my phone (which also comes to my Android
Wear watch) but since I've configured the notification to let me know messages
meeting certain criteria, it's much better than "push" driven E-mails.

------
Mr_P
> It's essentially a list of projects that every single individual and team is
> working on. Each task shows what needs to get done, what has already been
> completed, and how many hours it should take. It also shows what everyone is
> working on at a given time. If someone needs something, he just creates a
> new project.

It sounds like they made another bug tracker.

------
Spooky23
The secret of addressing email volume problems is to ignore it. I received
15,000 and sent 9,500 emails in 2009, when I declared no more. Now, I get
about 7,000 and send about 1,000. I read <40% and keep <3% more than 90 days.
Nothing lives in my mailbox more than 48 hours.

The funny thing is, people now apologize all of the time for bothering me. You
need to train most folks to respect your time. The ones I need to hear from
are on my iOS VIP list (~a dozen people, give or take, about a third VIP, a
third team members, a third external peeps) and I respond immediately if
necessary.

~~~
graeme
Do you just leave it all in the inbox and respond to what's near the top, or
do you archive it?

~~~
Spooky23
I typically zip through a few times a day and delete/act/save quickly. I try
to err towards delete. I started with a GTD process and tweaked it to work for
me. I have a script move everything older than 48 hours old into another
folder, and the server-wide policy purges it in 90 days unless I slap another
retention policy on it.

In the past, a lot of my email was "transactional" stuff that required
constant attention. I felt guilty for not checking it every few minutes, and
doing so was really stressful as a huge chunk of most days is in meetings or
calls due to the nature of what I do. (This also make me a hard person to
reach, as I don't work more than 50 hours a week unless there is a crisis)

Now that stuff is pushed to more appropriate venues, like our daily standup
meeting.

~~~
graeme
>In the past, a lot of my email was "transactional" stuff that required
constant attention. I felt guilty for not checking it every few minutes, and
doing so was really stressful as a huge chunk of most days is in meetings or
calls due to the nature of what I do. (This also make me a hard person to
reach, as I don't work more than 50 hours a week unless there is a crisis)

I think this may be my actual problem. I started a website that now has
customer support that goes to my inbox. I'm looking into delegating it.

They're not emails I can ignore, and they take time. Apart from that, email
volume isn't too bad.

------
zobzu
basically this force ppl to only check for things at specific times instead of
having to instantly interrupt work.

its more of a social issue than a technological one. some people will have
proper notifications setup and even when they get them, will not go check what
this is about immediately (maybe 3 or 4h later they will). It requires a lot
of self control or a certain mind set tho so I can see why you'
technologically enforce that behavior.

Note that you have to suppress twitter, fb, sms, etc as well for this to work
best.. thus.. thus there's still room for changing our habits when setting up
notifications and responding to them.

personally i made myself a rule that no notification is important enough for
my direct attention. so i kept notifications via my phone vibrating only for
direct calls (because people dont like voicemail and dont call a lot anyway)
and for special msgs that due to the work i do need immediate attention
(security incidents).

everything else, even if they're "urgent" to someone, i wont get notified and
wont check. i check twice a day instead, "manually" and this includes
everything: mail, twitter, etc. If its that important they'll call me. else
they can generally in fact wait a few hours - turns out im better at deciding
whats important to my own time than they are (obvious, i know).

I strongly encourage people who havent tried to do that, to give it a go for a
couple of weeks. Note that this includes _everything_. Your personal SMS,
tweets, what not as well. And that includes weekends and off hours too.
Otherwise this wont work.

I feel a lot more free since I started doing that a few years back and I get a
lot more done in fact - while I feel like I work less. win/win.

------
forgottenpass
_Cristian Rennella is really good at email. He responds to my messages within
minutes,_

All that effort to move to a new communication and set a culture that says it
doesn't have to be constantly checked, and he still didn't learn that the
problem with email is the idea the they have to be acted upon immediately?

~~~
tonyjstark
That was a nice critical reading on your side. For me the article basically
points out that they used email for some kind of project planning and of
course there are better way to do this. For urgent stuff something like
internal IM and for other stuff email isn't that bad.

------
vxNsr
This is basically a smaller version of what wordpress uses internally as
profiled by fast co here: [http://www.fastcolabs.com/3035463/how-matts-
machine-works](http://www.fastcolabs.com/3035463/how-matts-machine-works)

To those getting defensive about still using email: I guess it just depends on
how your company is organized and what it's doing: I work in a University and
there is no way we could get rid of email even internally, maybe we could do
away with email in our one office, but there is already very little email
here: it accounts for maybe 5% of my entire inbox on a daily basis. The rest
of coming from other offices and org's in the school.

Basically, any slightly complex org will have a lot of trouble getting rid of
email: but that's okay.

------
hnriot
Of course they don't need email, they can all see each other! Try working in a
company where projects routinely span a handful of countries.

Most email isn't personal anyway, it's often machine generated by the various
tools we use, reports of bugs changing status, servers coming online, servers
going offline, jobs finishing etc etc.

email is actually there for a reason, it's just just there to interrupt you.
At work you are expected to maintain contact with those you work with and
email is one of the ways we achieve this across time zones and geographic
boundaries.

------
diziet
Keep in mind -- their company on linkedin is <10 people. FC quotes 34~.

This is not a huge/ultra-growing company C-level/VP-level executive getting
300 emails a day.

------
redtrackker
Admirable case study. Seriously, this takes a lot of courage and discipline to
pull off. Kudos to the management team!

However I'm really beginning to doubt the legitimacy of the claim that Email
is the root of the productivity drain. People complain to me about SMS and
phone calls the same way they do about email. I highly doubt the solution is
to shun the medium/tech. The best way is to simply _tweak_ the people who use
them :)

------
syrnick
Having the team to focus on their work w/o email distractions is a dream of
productivity. Having a custom tool is key to getting this kind of thing to
work.
Airtable([https://airtable.com/invite/ijciBkzn](https://airtable.com/invite/ijciBkzn))
we posted yesterday on Show HN was built to get that set up easily.

~~~
HeyLaughingBoy
Or they could, you know, just shut off the email client until they are ready
to focus on email.

------
graeme
>Engineers by training, Rennella and his co-founder built a custom project
management platform that works a bit like a trimmed down version of the
communication tool Asana.

Slightly OT, but does anyone know of a tool like Asana or Trello that also
works offline?

I love Trello, but am going to be working offline for part of the day and need
something I can keep using.

~~~
wingerlang
I've looked for an offline/native osx Trello application for ages, I don't
think there is anything.

------
tdicola
I would take a slightly different approach and ban all email after ~7pm each
day and entirely on weekends. Obviously there need to be exceptions for people
that monitor mission critical systems, but otherwise there is absolutely
nothing productive in the long run with people pushing their work time all
night.

------
thunderbong
This was also done at ATOS by their CEO Thierry Breton. Although I don't know
the impact of it.

[http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-16055310](http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-16055310)

------
32faction
That's interesting, so it's like "passive" email or a notice board in a small
town; instead of being interrupted by an email notification, you can see what
needs to be done by checking out the board.

------
kashif
we build and use [http://flock.co](http://flock.co) (chat for teams) and it
has almost killed email for us. most communication and requests have started
getting routed on chat.

it is not clear if a 1-on-1 interaction increases efficiency substantially on
chat as opposed to email but in groups (emails with multiple stakeholders) it
is significantly more effective

------
giancarlostoro
I would use IRC instead, but I guess depending on the company they might not
be as familiar with using it.

