You need one of your team members, let’s call him Bob, to follow up with a customer about a sales request/complaint/query, and you need it done urgently. You probably send Bob an email more often than you think.
Bad idea!
You are fighting for attention
Yes, I understand that you flagged the email high priority. But does that really make any difference?
Problem is, you’ve just added the task to an endless stream of emails from other people: newsletters, junk mail and mails from family and friends to name a few. Are you really going to allow an important task to get lost in all that email?
It’s impossible to keep track of it
It is deleted once you have sent it. It won’t last forever, but it will be there until Bob replies.
You don’t know what’s happening. Did Bob reach out to another person to help him? Did he finish it but not let you know? Or is he still waiting for more information from another source. Unless you email Bob again, you won’t know.
You don’t know who is doing what
It’s impossible to keep track of who is being assigned tasks if you are assigning them. If you can’t answer this simple question, you aren’t really managing the team.
The process can’t be dictated by you
A task is often part of a larger process. Email doesn’t allow you to enforce this. You must be the workflow engine. It is impossible to create a task just for Bob and then know that the next person in the workflow will be assigned a task.
It’s not possible to report on it
What tasks are currently being assigned to Bob? How many quotes are currently awaiting approval? How many customer x queries do we receive on average per month? If you manage a team or business, you should be able answer these questions. The truth is that you won’t be able to.
Email was originally created as an electronic communication tool and should be used for that purpose. Slack and other newer communication tools do a better job of facilitating internal communication, but you still need to be able to manage tasks within your team.
Adam Shapiro is an IT professional since 2000. He co-founded pilotfish digital, a software company that specializes in SharePoint development. He founded Autopilot, a cloud-based workflow automation firm, in 2014 and AutoCollect in 2015.
