Working at a company that has over ten thousand employees means you get added to a lot of distribution lists without your knowledge or your control. For example, I get e-mails whenever some service players use is going to be updated. I don’t work with these services, aren’t involved in developing these services, and have never cared about when these services are going to be updated.
You’d think there would be an easy way to unsubscribe from these distribution lists but at least at my company, it is surprisingly difficult to get yourself removed from them. Remember, these are internal e-mails, so it’s not like an angry customer who wants to unsubscribe, it’s just us lowly employees.
As such, to keep my inbox sane, I have add filters to my Outlook client to send these dumb e-mails straight into my trash folder. I added three such filters lasts week and my inbox looks so much better.
Speaking of e-mails, it’s a rare day now when I actually have to compose or respond to an e-mail. Prior to about 2014, my primary method of communicating with co-workers would be e-mail. We’d have tons of e-mail threads discussing development of a feature or how we test something new we’d be making. Once Slack arrived on the scene, the number of e-mails I had to write or receive in my inbox dropped dramatically.
For collaboration and in a business setting, Slack just makes things a lot easier. It might be a bit different if your role requires a lot of communication with people outside an organization, in that case, e-mail is still very valid and the easiest way to get in touch with people externally. For me, I rarely need to communicate with external groups, so all my stuff can stay on Slack. On an average month, I might write less than ten e-mails a month at work.
Is this the same for you at work?