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According to a McKinsey study, email consumes an average of 560 hours a year! That amounts to 72.5 eight-hour work days! Time and energy that could have been spent closing a deal or acquiring one more client has instead been expended in reading and responding to emails, searching your mailbox and organizing email folders. But what if you could dispense with email at work? How much more could you do with the time not spent managing your email? Much more we are sure. Here are 3 alternatives to email that could just help make your work dreams come true!

1. Yammer
The easiest way to describe Yammer would be as “Facebook for the workplace”. Yammer changes how people communicate at the workplace by enabling users to make it a social experience. Colleagues have conversations on each other’s walls, quickly coordinate meetings, share documents and generally chat it up, all without having to check for email, clean out their mailboxes, hunt for stuff in their inbox or any of the other burdens that come with using a traditional email client. The Yammer interface is also clean, functional and gets the job done while making it look fun!

2. Twitter
In today’s fast-paced world, very few have the time to spend on long-winded emails or the space to store heavy attachments. It is so much easier to read a 140-character tweet that says it all and respond likewise. Apart from the brevity and the time-saving advantage that Twitter offers, it also eliminates the need to hunt for a message in your cluttered mailbox since it is next to impossible to lose a tweet! Businesses have also turned to Twitter to communicate faster and better with their customers, so much so that customer service is now judged by how quickly a business responds, not to an email, but to a tweet.

3. Video Chat
Nothing beats direct verbal communication. Email only comes in a distant second, a concession we make since it allows us to communicate with those who aren’t physically nearby. But all that has changed with the advent of video chat. Rather than send across an essay of an email about a complicated issue to a group of people, each of whom will respond at different times and on different threads, it is far easier to get them together for a group video chat on any of the multiple chat clients (such as Skype, Facetime, Google Hangouts, etc.) available in the market. Video chatting allows for greater clarity of the issue at hand, quick sharing of views and a quick resolution to the problem. All in all, lesser confusion and better productivity!

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