12 reasons why we're all about to say goodbye to emailing

So long to the obsession with reaching 'inbox zero', and adieu to the hours spent composing a witty out-of-office - new tech is finally freeing London from the tyranny of new mail, says Lucy Tobin
Say goodbye to emails
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Lucy Tobin15 June 2016

If you’re reading this in between checking your emails, or while your fingers autonomously fire off a CC-all to the office: bad news. You’re out of date. You might as well still be using Hotmail (emailing a millennial from a Microsoft address is akin to sending a fax).

That’s because email is over. Ploughing through an inbox of 93,324 missives when you return from holiday/each morning/every hour is seriously unproductive — not to mention unhealthy.

In France, new legislation gives employees the “right to disconnect” — sending work emails on the weekend is now illegal.

Even in more corporate-minded London, companies stretching from small start-ups to councils and international firms are hailing (via Twitter) the virtues of killing off — or at least restricting — email. When missives do need to be sent, it’s all about the brevity (and opt-in-or-out-ability) of social networking and new tech such as Slack and Hipchat.

So here’s why it’s time to sign off email … without a passive aggressive out-of-office signature, please (see number 8).

1. Millennials have moved on

As Ted Nash, the 25-year-old chief executive of Farringdon-based mobile advertising start-up Tapdaq (and the first teenager to achieve more than a million downloads in the App Store), sees it, why email when there are better alternatives? He uses chat apps Slack, JIRA and Google Hangouts to communicate with colleagues. “Though our HQ is in London, we often work from Calgary, San Francisco, the Czech Republic and elsewhere — right now we have a team member in Japan but we can communicate as a team, instantaneously, via Slack. It aids our ethos of being completely transparent as a team, and company, which you don’t get with email.”

2. Shorter is sweeter...

First the text, then Twitter, then the fact that no one has time to spend more than 20 seconds talking to anyone nowadays means we’re good at being succinct. So when we face the email’s huge blank page we feel the need to fill it with extraneous dull words. Why else do people you’ve never met launch into an email, “Frank! How’re you doing this morning? It’s nearly halfway through hump-day!”

This is obviously especially bad if you’re not called Frank. But where email used to be a simple form of communication to get a point across, now it has become just another form of dull, blanket marketing where you can barely sift through the rot to find out when your important Amazon parcel (of three packs of Dairy Milk) is going to arrive.

3. ...and time is money

Tech firm Intel introduced “no-email Fridays” for its engineers to encourage them to solve problems by phone or in person; French IT firm Atos is on schedule to end all staff emailing by next year, and in the UK Halton Housing Trust has spent two years training staff to stop emailing (listing the most internal email-senders on a wall of shame, restricting the use of “reply all” and “cc”) and is set to switch off the capacity for any internal emails by next year.

Meanwhile, IT services firm Capgemini reported cutting internal email traffic by 40 per cent in 18 months after putting staff on Yammer, another social network for businesses. When the likes of the CBI start issuing press releases about reducing internal emails “which absorb more days of productivity a year than bank holidays” (which the business lobby group practically wants to ban), you’ll know the whole of corporate Britain is logging off email.

4. Email has become London’s natural home of bullsh*t

I’m talking about the people whose email signature reads “innovator. connector. collaborator. reach out to me anytime!” They’re the ones who took email and ruined it.

5. Bankers hate it

And while they’re not the trendiest people around, they’re actually usually ahead of the curve on office matters (possibly because they spend more time there than any other profession).

“We’ve always used an internal chat system for quick questions,” says one City analyst. “It flashed up on your screen and is more intrusive than email, so your colleague has to respond ASAP, and you work faster — that’s massively important in bonus season.”

But it used to be popular for a whole other reason. “Colleagues sitting next to each other would use it all the time — to compare private stuff such as pay packets (always in weird code) or deals, because there was a perception that the conversations were not logged. But then the LIBOR trials suggested that in fact these chats were logged by compliance — and now it’s not used quite as much...”

Email isn’t either, though — the favoured form of communication among some in the City now is … the handwritten note.

6. The new kids on the block are more fun...

They let staff, wherever they are, dip in to find out what everyone else is up to, without the need to constantly send updates to all. “Which is why almost the whole of the media runs off Slack now,” explains a veteran journalist at one media tech start-up. “Basically, it makes everything a bit too fun: rather than trudging through formal emails it’s a permanently flowing stream of work — bad jokes and gossipy links as well as things that really urgently need doing.”

There are downsides: “You send more messages because it’s so easy, but people also expect responses straight away. And then, before you know it, you’ve got Slack open at home and you’re chatting away with your colleagues without realising it’s not work time. Still, it’s better than another load of emails.”

7. ... because the cock-ups are funnier

Hipchat and Slack have their own version of “oops, I ‘CC’d all” into that email about throwing a sickie tomorrow’— and it’s funnier (perhaps only while they’re new). There’s the message that was meant to be sent privately but went in the public forum — “I told everyone I was thinking of quitting my job but was waiting to hear back from a rival,” admits one in sales. “The whole office just turned towards me at once. I quit that day.” But better still comes from the firms that use a gif add-on which turns typed words into pictures. “I typed ‘everyone welcome’ and along came a gif of ‘f*ck the motherf***er’...,” one tech PR admits. “‘Wow’ was one of the more polite responses.”

Lightweight laptops - in pictures

1/5

8. No more insufferable OOO

The true signal of summer — once indicated by the availability of a Tube seat a whole three stations from the start of the line — is now the launch of that oh-so-fun sport, OOO ping-pong. As in, you email someone and get their out of office, it says to contact someone else but that triggers their OOO, someone is actually at their desk but oh-so-busy that they’ve set up a FOOO (fake out of office: “I’m here, and working, but totally manic right now. I’m reading messages every 47 minutes and will get back to you when I can be bothered”). Eventually you get through to a working human but by then you’re on holiday and their response meets your OOO. Time-sapping pointlessness.

9. Spam

Sure, gmail et al have vastly improved at diving in front of the viagra and “you wan da loterie!” spam emails but all those shops, websites and “connectors” who are “reaching out” with “exciting news” are still wasting your data allowance. And your time. You’re sick of spam.

10. Email = the ever present worry of hacking

Just ask Hillary.

11. Your inbox has more pointless abbreviations than Fifa

No, Ian from accounts, you’re not saving anyone time writing rgds rather than “regards”, you just look illiterate. And ‘wrt’ and ‘iro’? Just because you’re living in a dull world of corporate obfuscation, forcing me to Google your invented acronyms for “with regards to” and “in respect of” is eating into my lunch break.

12. The return of productivity

You feel super-productive at reaching “inbox zero”, when really you’ve just pressed the delete button for a few hours and not got any actual work done. Some entrepreneurs employ “email managers” — but that’s old-school.

MBA courses now are obsessed with the practices at Volkswagen — which turns off its server at 5.30pm — and Daimler, which stops staff receiving work emails when on holiday.

Follow Lucy Tobin on Twitter: @lucytobin

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