How I Learned to Love Email by Using it Less

In fact, our strengthened collaboration and productivity is less about the technology and more about the efficient email habits we learned by using the technology. We spend less time pushing redundant missives back and forth, and more time collaborating with each other within documents, whether we're in Word or Google Docs, Google Drive or Dropbox. We still use email, but we're working better and more closely together because we use it less. Collaboration has become less about messages and more about documents.

If you think email is starting to feel outdated, perhaps it's not the tool, but your misuse of the tool. For years, I resorted to email when other forms of communication would have been much more effective. Why? Because everyone has an inbox. It's the most reliable way to reach someone without having to know all their different communication preferences.

What our chosen email tool did was help break us out of the email box we were in to see all the different communication streams we could choose from for any given task. Email is still a very important — no, more important — method of communication.

We just use it less.

Christophe Goudy is the senior vice president, client development, at Hotwire Public Relations.