As we celebrate Zero Inbox Day, Andrew Filev, CEO and founder of Wrike shares his thoughts on the future of email.
“As we acknowledge this year’s Zero Inbox Day, I have to ask, why can’t every day be Zero Inbox Day.
In 2015, I predicted that businesses would abandon email as a productivity tool in 10 years. Seven years later, we’re not far off. Organisations are turning to other solutions that not only enable them to communicate but more efficiently collaborate on work by tying into workflows in ways email cannot. We’re at a critical juncture where, if organisations want to succeed in the coming years, they must consider reducing the amount of time spent in email threads and increase time spent in solutions that provide 360-degree visibility and can manage and help execute against the full scope of work with workflow automation.
Our digital age has catapulted the complexity of the work we carry out each day. Global networks and a never-ending stream of communication tools and processes have made it harder to keep track of the day-to-day, especially when things are not effectively integrated. In fact, new research from Wrike found that knowledge based workers send and receive 295 work-related messages on average each day and spend 89 working days per year, on average, due to the ‘dark matter of work’ created by these messages. Having an overflowing inbox – which is siloed from other systems and applications exacerbates the problem.
Zero Inbox Day presents us with an opportunity to reflect on how we’re managing work complexities and how we can modernise the way we work to thrive in uncertain times. Cleaning up our inboxes won’t solve the problem. Finding real solutions for information overload and siloed systems will. Organisations need a single source of truth that brings all work (and workflows) together in one place to increase visibility, streamline processes, and boost the employee experience so chaotic inboxes can’t distract from the end goal.”
