4 Situations You Should Never Use Email For

If you are like most of us, your email inbox is a huge source of distraction and frustration. It’s a bottomless pit that constantly pulls you away from the high-value tasks you should be doing on your business. And, unfortunately, it isn’t going away anytime soon.

A few years back, my workplace did a survey of small-business owners and asked them what their biggest waste of time was during the business week. We discovered that email was the largest time waste for these executives by a factor of three to one, with the average person wasting over eight hours per week on average. That’s one full working day per week on low-value junk email.

So, today I wanted to share with you four times that you should close your email program and communicate with your team or clients in a different way.

1. Project Management

If you’re managing a high volume of tasks and project deliverables, email is not the way to go. It’s clunky and slow, and details and follow-up tasks can easily get lost in the shuffle.

Instead, move your projects to an online project management software like Basecamp, Trello, Zoho Projects, or Hive. You will be able to assign specific tasks to your team members and have a broad overview of where everything stands with a few simple clicks. No more searching around an inbox for a lost email thread.

2. Difficult Conversations

Email is awful for nuanced, emotionally complex conversations. You’re just going to end up with heartache, creating all kinds of fires that take 10 times more time and emotional energy to put out. Even though it’s difficult, having an in-person or phone conversation is the only way to go with complex situations.

3. Real-Time Feedback Loop

Have you ever found yourself sending someone an email, and then 30 seconds later you get a reply? And a minute and a half later, you reply back to their reply? What you’re having is a chat conversation. And email is never the time or place for that.

Why? Because it forces you to have a low level of vigilance to monitor your inbox, which takes you away from higher-level tasks. If you’re going to use chat, try WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, Skype, or Slack. It’s more structured, and you will end up being more productive.

4. Brainstorming

Lastly, email is a horrible place to creatively brainstorm ideas, yet many people try to use it for just that. Often, an email thread gets passed around from one person to another with everyone adding ideas to the mix. In the end, you might have a few good thoughts, but nothing beats the alchemy of creative energy that comes from a true in-person brainstorming session. Email just isn’t built for that.

Email will always be there, but if used properly it can help you drive your business faster and smarter. Keep it in its place—but don’t let it drive you in the areas where it falls short.