Stop Digging for Old Emails

Something I often hear in business contexts that always makes me roll my eyes: "Hang on, I'm looking for that email." How many times this month have you spent time digging in your inbox for a critical piece of information?

To me, this is akin to if you walked to your physical mailbox, opened up the bills, birthday cards, and junk mail, and then shoved the opened pieces back into the box to be dealt with in the future, as day after day of additional mail piles on top. Would that be a good way to stay on top of your personal communications?

Put simply, email is a useful way to transmit information, and a terrible way to store and recall information. Teams perform at their best when everyone can quickly access accurate information when they need it.

Imagine the valuable time you would save if everyone could get away from the inbox doom scroll to find the latest update, or if approval workflows were automated so that a request from a team member didn't get lost in the sands of newsletters and office updates.

There are hundreds of productivity tools out there with a million bells and whistles, steep learning curves, and hefty price tags, but in reality, most organizations already have access to simple tools that they aren't using to their fullest extent. And at the end of the day, the best tool is one that you 1) already have and 2) your people will actually use.

I'm a big nerd for organization and productivity systems, so if you ever want to chat about them, let me know! 🤓