When I started undergrad in the (very very very) late 90’s I remember getting my shiny, new email address. “Move over hotmail,” I thought, “ajacobs@someverylongcomoboofletters.university.edu is BIG TIME, bitches.”
And that was fun. Using Outlook and having emails get “stuck” in the outbox and what not. And then came my first work email address, followed by a few more of those until gmail showed up and the rest is history. Or is it?
Gmail changed the way we “do” email. It was no longer send email, wait 3-5 days for a response. It turned into, “Hey, neighbor in cube next to me, didja get my email? Why haven’t you responded yet?” Oy vey. And then they just started to pile up, threads upon threads of conversations, archiving, categorizing, color coding and that anxiety that surrounded sitting down and checking your email after happy hour on a Wednesday. The expectation that if an email sat for more than 20 minutes it was deemed overdue and we became poor at communicating. We collectively moved out and moved into our inboxes.
Slowly but surely we started to hear about ways to manage our inboxes. Which is nice if you’re the kind of person who is OK with tools managing you as opposed to YOU managing your tools. Then I learned about the NO EMAIL COMPANY. A mentor of mine mentioned that he had read about Atos and their “Zero Email” policy. Pure genius:
“Zero email™ starts with you. Please join us in our journey.”
We are all fed up with living in our inboxes and want to move back home. At Proof, in late 2013, we joined Atos in their journey to become a “zero email” company. Sure, we still receive email from those who are new to Proof (it’s a journey, after all) but as soon as someone comes on board with us (client, partner, team member, etc.) we have other tools that we use to communicate: Basecamp for projects , Slack for internal conversations and iDoneThis so we all know what we’re up to and, wait for it, our phones. It’s simple, easy to use and fun- largely thanks to the wide range of imoges on Slack.
To me Inbox Zero Nonexistent is the real big time, bitches. I have officially moved home and I’m pretty stoked because the last time I was hanging out on the southern Pacific coast of Mexico, I bought a hammock which is calling my name in the backyard.