Productivity at work : 5 reasons for banning internal emails

Email is an unavoidable communication tool and is increasingly ubiquitous. For communicating with customers, suppliers, it is a quick solution that often replaces time spent on a phone call. But, within a company is email really the most sensible solution when you want to improve productivity at work? Nothing could be further from the truth.

Email - a waste of time?

Every email user agrees; communicating by email can quickly become an obstacle course. This becomes clear to us as soon as we try and do a search for a particular bit of information. It sounds simple but given the number of emails received daily by anyone in a professional capacity, things can quickly get out of hand. Who sent the email, which inbox or subdirectory is it stored in? Not all of us are perfectionists and disciplined enough to instantly file or classify our emails in a way that they can be found again. And, how should they be classified?

Let’s stop looking at our inbox every minute

Productivity at work is certainly not improved when we spend our time checking our inbox. How many times do we interrupt a task (sometimes important and often urgent) to do this? It is completely unproductive to be constantly checking your emails. Focus on the work at hand and check your inbox at certain fixed times.

Did your email get sent?

Giving instructions to employees by email can be risky. Once the information is sent, how do you know the employee will act on it? Will you know if he doesn’t? You keep on with your own work and you might even forget about the task you assigned to someone else. Using a collaborative tool like Planzone, you would have a real follow up with information on current tasks and tasks performed.

What if everyone doesn’t regard emails in the same way?

Productivity at work starts with organization, good organization is the basis of everything. How can you organize using something that everyone uses in a different way? Within a company, some employees assign a high priority to viewing their emails and are efficient at carrying out what is asked of them, others will accumulate emails, never classify them and sometimes even delete them if they feel they are not directly concerned. Meanwhile, the information is lost, the work is not completed and the company loses effectiveness or credibility.

An email is not a task!

It's amazing the number of people who send instructions via email. Email is really all about communication, not about organization and planning. An email can be sent to one or more people, all of whom (or not) will reply (or not) either to all or just to the sender! In short, communication is quickly broken down and tasks left incomplete. Let’s stop sending internal emails to give instructions - let’s use the tools designed to create tasks and centralize communication!

With Planzone for example, you can easily turn an email into a task:

• Subject > Task name
• Body > Comment
• Recipient > Assignee

Also, by setting a deadline and a priority level, you won’t waste time finding information, you make sure that nothing is forgotten and you always know what you have to deal with and by when.

Test Planzone free for 14 days and see how easy it is to stop using internal emails.