This was a huge plus when I decided to join the company. I've never been more productive and less distracted. I get to focus on work, instead of a daily deluge of emails some of which inevitably get lost.
Another benefit of moving this all to Slack, for me, is that the team communicates way more transparently than I've seen at any other company. We're plugged into what is going on (if we want to be), and the politics of "who is on what email thread" essentially evaporates. I use private messages on slack sometimes for super-sensitive stuff, but that's only happened a few times since I came on board.
Biggest downside? It's gonna suck if I ever have to take a job at a company with entrenched email culture :-(.
- customers
- prospects
- end users
- recruiting
- registrars
- suppliers
I see that you're still doing 'email for external communications' but that's where the pain point lies for me, internal is manageable.
- 90% of customer conversations occur via Intercom.io our hello@primellop address and all reply-to’s point there. And, generally the other 10% that come directly to me where it makes sense to have the rest of the team available to help, get cc’d into hello@ in my response.
- currently all our recruiting is inbound (mostly through angel.co) and I follow up with people there to schedule a call. Certainly some amount of external email around that.
- on the sales front we are definitely using email. Happy to play in their world and make it easy for them. But, again, most next actions and internal collaboration/communication moves to trello/hackpad/relateIQ
- all the services we use obviously send a bunch of email, that we sometimes need to respond to. But all of that is in a group email that most of us can dig through if we need to.
And, FWIW, I’ve had the opposite experience with email. I can handle the external communication OK… it’s the mess of internal email that has caused the most headaches.
I personally liked having lots of checkbox subtasks on trello tasks to show continuing progress, but no one else at the company used that feature.
It isn't perfect, but it does keep us making forward progress. And sometimes those things that just don't ever make it to the current board are things that don't really need to get done.
From the way you are describing it typically the current board was emptied each week? New tasks were only brought in at the beginning of the week?
Did you break down larger tasks into chunks that could be handled within one week? If so, how did you track progress within multi-month projects if they were broken down into small pieces?
I certainly don't mean to be misleading. But, it definitely feels as extreme as completely banning email. At least for our team, all our past experience with hating email at a company was tied to internal email culture and the inability to actually do work.