A Company That Got Rid of Email | Hacker News Reader

A Company That Got Rid of Email

fastcompany.com

48 pointsdsr1251 comments

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.

This is what Tim Ferris famously advocated in the four hour workweek back in 2007 [1]

[1]http://fourhourworkweek.com/2007/03/22/how-to-check-e-mail-t...

I took my inspiration to take similar measures from that same source, and I can say it makes a huge difference in my concentration and productivity.

Yes, but you still then live with the idea that there could be an email you should read at any moment. I admire the self-discipline of those who can resist the urge to check, but I have never been able to.

For me, simply using Trello and Slack has obliterated all need for email with collaborators.

So do you only check Slack a couple times a day then? If not, what is the difference with email?

Excellent point. One thing that I'm noticing is that other tools are becoming just as busy as Email for me. At times I feel like there isn't a difference. The volume of email is what bothers me. But now if that volume is being transferred to Slack (sorry to point them out) I'm still stuck with the same problem. It's the people behind the tools which cause the problem IMHO :)

If something is truly important people will find a way to contact you through the phone, IM, etc. Constantly checking and responding to email is a vicious cycle that will lead people to expect you can be interrupted any time.

I did this recently. I also turned off all notifications on my phone that make sound/vibrate, except phone calls and SMS (and I rarely get a call or text).

Now I don't get interrupted as often and life is much less stressful

And you never know about critical issues coming in.

I like to be notified, but if I'm reeeeally busy I don't go look at the emails. When I do, it's mostly notifications of something (delete immediately), simple requests (answer in 30 secs - 2 minutes) or stuff to get back to later (flag and/or put on my TODO list to schedule for later).

It doesn't really interrupt my work, as my actual work is still what and when I schedule it. Since most tasks have cleary communicated priorities anyway, this works nicely.

Everyone's situation is different, but I decided that no email is critical enough to interrupt me.

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.

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.

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

Focus.

Completely disagree. Email is the one internet technology that's had the most success and provided the most benefit in the widest variety of use cases. It pre-dates the web by decades and is still the one technology used by almost every person who uses a computer at all. The very fact that it's not focused on a specific "process" and has very little in the way of required structure or content is a strength: it works almost everywhere.

The history of software is littered with dead, defunct, and failed attempts to create task managers and communication platforms that impose a process on users. It almost never works.

That's the problem we're trying to solve with our startup MorphMail https://www.morphmail.com

As someone who could someday become a customer, here's some knee-jerk advice for your landing page:

- The first screen doesn't "hook" me. Put a background image or product image or something there, and a better punchline.

- I'd eliminate half the text and increase font sizes of item bodies.

- The "What is MorphMail?" section is a bit convoluted. I want to know why it's better than email. How about a side-by-side comparison with a mobile email client?

- The UI shots look very rough and a bit Windows-98-y. I get that those are probably early stage mockups, but I wouldn't consider using an app with this design. To me they are a turnoff, especially when compared to iOS Mailbox or even Gmail.

If that sounds harsh, I apologize (please consider that I wouldn't have taken the time if I didn't care); I wish you the best of luck with your product!

That's great feedback! We're a couple of engineers, so the marketing stuff isn't exactly our area of expertise. The current design is just an off the shelf jQuery mobile template to make prototyping easy while we focus on functionality.

I'm a dev too, but have some photoshop skills and have to learn this stuff myself. I can really recommend that one of you gets to know Photoshop/Pixelmator/Sketch and browses a lot of other product pages and apps (so you can "borrow" there.. stealing shamelessly is often a good idea ;)). A product needs someone who cares about that stuff.

Wait, so you're trading asynchronous, non-interrupt driven communication (email) for synchronous, interruptive communication (IM, phone)???

I do the exact opposite - I got rid of my phone, and rarely log into IM, and have trained all my coworkers to email me so that I can respond when I'm ready, without breaking my focus.

How has email gained higher interrupt priority than phone/IM?!

I suspect the point is that the IMs and phone calls are much less numerous than the emails.

Your point about interrupt priority is a good one, though. I think simply turning off email notifications may be more than half the solution. ... There, I just did it, and I feel better already :-)

I would go so far as to suggest a company policy (or at least, a publicly announced engineering-department policy) that email may be ignored for as much as a week, and that anything that can't wait that long should use IM or phone.

I'm not thinking that most people would ignore email for that long most of the time; in practice I think most would check it once or twice a day. But sometimes people need several days uninterrupted, and they should be able to have it.

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.

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

thats a pretty good point ;P

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.

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.

> 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.

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.

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

Act, delegate, file or delete - that's all there's to it. Most of the time I just use my Delete button.

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.

>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.

this is called setting up filters, there's no trick to it, it's pretty simple to set up filter and ignore people you don't want to respond to. 7000 is 22 a day, assuming a 6 day work week, that's pretty low volume to handle, I would venture to say that you could probably manage to read more than 9 emails a day (40% of 22)

People feeling like they have to apologize sounds like you've made people feel guilty for emailing you. I can't help but find the whole comment a little self important and pretentious. You have time to fritter on hn, yet manage to only read 9 emails a day and reply to 3 a day, that's pretty lame. If you worked at my company and managed that, I'd have to let you go.

Why would you assume a six day work week? That's a scary attitude..

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.

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?

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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 :)

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) we posted yesterday on Show HN was built to get that set up easily.

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

>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.

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

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.

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

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.

we build and use 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

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

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