As a result of striving for an empty inbox (we’ll call this “fake inbox zero”), some people resort to methods such as:

• Going nuclear, whereby the user just clears all items by archiving and/or deleting.
• Running a search/filter on specific items as and when needed and letting the other items pile up, making the process more arduous each time around. Think of it like never cleaning your room, but knowing “that special place” you leave your keys!
• Avoiding it altogether, mistaking ignorance for bliss.

Alright, so that’s all fine and good if it’s your own personal inbox. Sure, maybe the latest deals are just more, unnecessary noise and you really don’t need any more inspirational quotes to lighten up your day… but what about business!?

What about when risk is involved, along with customer satisfaction, work related events and other deadlines you have coming up? What about internal email/messaging and org-wide notices?

Well, everything has its time, place and responsible persons. Enter YUDOmail. YUDOmail enables businesses and teams to achieve Inbox Zero WITHOUT going nuclear, deleting stuff you shouldn’t, and losing things you have to follow up on.

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Remember when you first started using email? If you were an early user (pre-1990) you were probably getting 5-10 emails a day and co-workers still picked up the phone or stopped by your office to ask you for something. It was fairly easy to manage your email inbox.

Now email has become a chore. What was once used strictly as a communications tool has now become the central place from which work is received, managed and delegated in organizations. So in addition to having more emails to deal with (the recent reported average is 200 emails a day), your email inbox is a storehouse of “to-dos”, “to-reads” and items of “indeterminate status.” The real problem for users and the companies they work for is that those important tasks are often getting missed because they get buried in the daily flood of emails and email programs alone do not have sufficient capability to effectively manage tasks.

Why Email is Not a Task Management Tool

When we made YuDoMail available to beta testers we uncovered seven specific issues that users experience with task management in email.

1. Tracking: Users find it difficult to keeping track of lots of concurrent actions: One’s own to-dos and to-dos one expects from others.

2. Prioritizing: Limited capability to mark things as important or outstanding amongst the less important items.

3. Managing: Email alone does not make it easy to manage activity extending over time or keep track of threads of activity and  discussions.

4. Monitoring: No way to monitor deadlines and reminders, which may be associated with particular messages or other content, and there is no closed-loop process.

5. Organizing: Difficult to collate related items (e.g., an extended thread) and associated files and links.

6. Reporting: A task oriented overview, at a glance, rather than scrolling around and inspecting folders, is non-existent.

7. Analyzing: No ability to view request volumes, outstanding requests and turnaround times at the individual and team level, as well as important metrics to show trends and support root cause analysis.

The exciting outcome for our beta testers is that they were able to overcome all of these issues using YuDoMail. For the first time teams had complete visibility into the request status, for themselves and for their team, to drive accountability and improve productivity. If you’re interested in giving YuDoMail a test drive, click here. If you’re already a YuDoMail users, we would love to hear your task management stories and tips.

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Traditional Email is Like Old Landlines.

Traditional email as we know it is one of the most useful (and overly used) tools we have in business. It is useful because it allows us to send messages, tasks and information in a reliable and stable way. It is a generally accepted and popular communication medium between businesses and everyone knows how to use it; and despite naysayers and the rise of social media, statistics show that every year more and more emails are sent. In 2013 more than 100 billion business emails were sent and received EVERY DAY. By 2017 this will rise to an estimated 132 billion emails daily, according to The Radicati Group.

However, email’s ubiquity is also its downfall. Because it is so easy (and un-structured), it is often over-used without much regard for the recipients (we all want OUR points and requests to come across) and there is no transparency or accountability, which means we all suffer under its yolk of inefficiency. So traditional email is a bit like the traditional landline phone. It was a game changing technology when it first came out, but its success soon created bottlenecks and needed to be improved in order to cope with its success. For landlines it was first the mobile phone (we all remember Nokia) and then there were smart phones (i.e. the era of iPhones and Samsung Galaxies). For email, what is the next generation?

The “Smart Phone” Version of Email

The world has moved on from conventional landline and snail mail solutions. We now live in an era of high transaction volumes, large multinational organisations, big data, automation and communication. So our preferred b2b communication method of email needs to change and adapt for this. And this is not just about handling volume –systems can handle that. It is the people that can’t and then suffer from it.

That is why businesses are looking for the “smart phone” version of email. Smart Email where emails are grouped together, have clear owners, routed to the correct place, are accounted for and can be reported on so that people can be productive and spend their time on value adding activities, not “reading and filing email”.

There are a few options for smarter email. For individuals, check out Mailbox or Xobni. For SMEs check out Gmail’s new tabs, Zendesk, Mail Pilot, AtTask, Workshare or Help Scout. For medium or larger companies, your options are developing custom workflow platforms using software such as Savvion, Tibco or Pega, or using corporate social media tools such as Yammer, Salesforce.com’s Chatter or blueKiwi, or an “email workflow out the box” solution for individual teams or organisation wide use such as YuDoMail.

The key thing to take away is: Email volumes are not going to go down. In fact I predict the use of email is going to continue to increase over the next few years, purely because more and more people are coming online every day and more businesses going digital. So the business community best prepare for this avalanche of email coming their way. They better get “smart email”.

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