Email notes to make Gmail conversations smoother

In nearly every aspect, communication is crucial to success, be it in personal situations or in business.

A team is not strong if there is no open communication amongst the team members. Good collaboration comes out of good communication.

But we already know this and that’s probably why our inboxes are flooded with hundreds of emails every day!

The problem is no longer that we don’t communicate, it is that we don’t communicate efficiently or rather our productivity is taking a hit due to our time-consuming communication methods.

For instance, say you are working on a critical project where the requirements seem to be getting updated every other day. Managing a project like this will need open communication and strong collaboration.

You can communicate by shooting out emails every time there is a new update or by calling for meetings. You probably would prefer the former, considering how time-consuming meetings can be. True, email is indeed fast and delivers the message quite effectively.

But the truth is, too many emails will make employees miserable, you included.

Consider this:

• An employee checks email 36 times per hour.
• According to Radicati Group, employees receive around 78 emails per day and send around 37 emails.
• It takes an employee around 16 minutes to get his focus back on the task after reading an email.
• We spend around half of our working day dealing with emails.

So you see, all of us are having to spend increasing number of hours at work since we are spending half the work day handling our inboxes. A total loss of time, energy, and money to both the employer and the employee.

In fact, did you know that we spend around $1800 for unnecessary emails!

Also, consider the division in the focus caused by unnecessary emails. Flipping between the email and the task at hand is essentially nothing but multi-tasking and science have proved how inefficient that can be.

At the same time, email’s ubiquity, immediacy, and simplicity make it an excellent communication tool. A manager, for instance, will prefer to drop an email to an employee when delegating a task, instead of walking over to their desk and physically doing it.

This is the reason why we often long email threads – even as long as 200 emails or more, despite the fact that these long email chains keep decreasing our productivity.

So, how can we reconcile email’s ease-of-use for communication with its inefficiency? By supplementing it with the right tool.

A feature such as Email Notes is an excellent alternative to having email conversions without the hassle of actually sending emails and overloading everyone’s inboxes.

Using Email Notes, whenever you want to communicate important updates regarding a project that your team is working on such as deadlines, change in requirements etc., you can drop a note right next to the email and everyone, with whom you have shared the email, can see it.

Here’s how a conversation using Email Notes will look like:

You can do away with the hassle of internal emails

A major portion of our inbox clutter comes from internal emails. While communication is indeed the oxygen for a team, having to set up meetings all the time or playing email ping pong are both not very good solutions.

With a feature like Email Notes, anytime you need to relay something to a team member you just have to send them a Note. The whole conversation between you and this team member is available for others, with whom you shared the email, to see as well.

Keeps your internal team discussions away from the client

Another problem with internal email conversations is that sometimes these conversations may get included in client emails when you hit reply.

Exposing your internal discussions to the client may seem unprofessional on your part and is just not very neat. There is just too much haphazardness when your internal discussions get mixed up with your external conversations and it is too hard and time-consuming to keep track of both.

Using Email Notes, you can clearly segment your internal conversations from your external ones in that you can use your Notes for internal team discussions and emails for client discussions.

Easy to locate the necessary information

Just in case you were wondering, conversing through Email Notes will not make it any hard to locate important information exchange with your teammate later in the future. Just like you search for emails, you can search for Notes too. All the information is stored for your future reference.

All the Email Notes pertaining to a given email will be displayed on the right-hand bottom corner of the screen; you just have to scroll up and down do go through the discussions.

You don’t have to disturb all your team members

In internal conversations, even though we need to notify only one person, in order to keep the team informed we keep them all in the loop. As we saw in the beginning, emails can be quite distracting, affecting the productivity of everyone.

With Email Notes, you can choose to notify the person you want to send the update to. This way only the intended person will get the notification and the rest of the team can carry on with their business.

You organize your Email Notes conversations using colors

The feature comes with an option to change colors for each Note. For instance, you can use a blue Note for an update, a green Note for a reminder, a pink Note for a query etc.

This way, conversations are more streamlined. You can also simply use the Notes feature as a sticky note in that you can leave notes for yourself about some insights or action items for future reference.

 Wrapping up

Being able to have smooth conversations that allow conducting your business easily without having to step out of inbox or having to deal with chunky email chains is the luxury that Email Notes provides.