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I banned email at my startup

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Re: I banned email at my startup

#11

Post by thomasknoll »

jacquesm wrote: post #9

Interesting approach. How would you propose to interface with the rest of the world where not having email is about as strange as not having a fax was a decade ago? - customers - prospects - end users - recruiting - registrars - suppliers That's a genuine question, I'd love to get off the email treadmill completely and just getting rid of the corporate component would be great. I see that you're still doing 'email fo…

I answered something similar generally below to exelius. But, to answer a few of your specific examples:

- 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.

Re: I banned email at my startup

#12

Post by nebyoolae »

The title is somewhat misleading (it's catchy, though), but I agree with your points and think that while email is still a great catch-all communication tool, there are better ones when you're actually trying to work in a team on many projects.

Re: I banned email at my startup

#13

Post by thomasknoll »

nebyoolae wrote: post #12

The title is somewhat misleading (it's catchy, though), but I agree with your points and think that while email is still a great catch-all communication tool, there are better ones when you're actually trying to work in a team on many projects.

I was trying to decide whether to add, "and you won't believe what happens next!!?!" to the end. But, I decided to keep it simple.

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.

Re: I banned email at my startup

#15

Post by nanoscopic »

How do you keep track of performance metrics for tasks? I used trello at a previous job, and had issues when there are many tasks, ensuring that tasks are actually getting done in reasonable amounts of time.

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.

Re: I banned email at my startup

#16

Post by thomasknoll »

nanoscopic wrote: post #15

How do you keep track of performance metrics for tasks? I used trello at a previous job, and had issues when there are many tasks, ensuring that tasks are actually getting done in reasonable amounts of time. 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.

For each area of the business we have two boards: planning and current. The planning board gets pretty messy, and is the place where we capture all the ideas that come to mind, comments and input are added to help prioritize those ideas as a must-get-to-next-week, or someday-this-would-be-nice. And the current board is the chunk of cards we are committing to getting done this week "no matter what". So, the current board stays pretty clean, and people work real hard to get everything cleared out of there each week, because then we can go to the planning board and grab some of the other high-priority things and check them off.

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.

Re: I banned email at my startup

#17

Post by nanoscopic »

thomasknoll wrote: post #16
nanoscopic wrote: post #15

How do you keep track of performance metrics for tasks? I used trello at a previous job, and had issues when there are many tasks, ensuring that tasks are actually getting done in reasonable amounts of time. 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.

For each area of the business we have two boards: planning and current. The planning board gets pretty messy, and is the place where we capture all the ideas that come to mind, comments and input are added to help prioritize those ideas as a must-get-to-next-week, or someday-this-would-be-nice. And the current board is the chunk of cards we are committing to getting done this week "no matter what". So, the current bo…

Where I was at we had a planning board and that was fine for incoming work. Tasks that could be done within a couple of days were fine as well; we did have a sort of 'current' board. The difficulty was only really for long running tasks that took more than a week.

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?

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