Chapter8: HowtoWorkFasterinaRemoteTeam 76 One of the best things we did early on to thwart this imminent mess of email as the Zapier team grew, was take an inventory of which conversations belonged in our inboxes and which ones belonged elsewhere for the sake of context and convenience. The result: Only two types of internal emails remained.(Theemails:teamfeedbackfollowinganapplicant’sgroupinterview andannouncementsofnewhires.) Company and department updates, project specs, design mock-ups, and in- dividual “Friday Update” reports moved from email to our private internal blog, and the aggravating “Reply All” emails that accompanied them became easy-to-readthreadedcomments.Teamanddepartmentfeedback,alongwith questions and discussions, moved to team collaboration and chat app Slack, which replaced one-on-one email threads with its private messaging feature, too.AndSlackevenbecametheplacewefindoutaboutnewpublicandprivate blog posts with a Zapier integration. It’s tough to put a total “time saved” figure on the email changes inside our team, but that’s ok because it’s not the only—or even the best—result. What’s best is the order it brings—assurance that when there’s a new email, it’s meaningful, and when there are five replies to a department update on our internal blog, they’re quick to read (and “like,” too). Or as Andreas Klinger, Head of Remote at AngelList, puts it: “Communication feels cheap to do but often adds up to a lot of time costs and very often only results in more communication (unless framed in processes).” Streamlining communications and cutting down on the back-and-forth emails is the true benefit of pulling communications out of your inbox. “Communicationfeelscheaptodobutoftenaddsuptoalotoftime costs.” - Andreas Klinger, Product Hunt Thatsaid,yourteammightnotneedtopullinternalcommunicationoutofyour inbox to find benefits. The team behind payments remote-friendly company Stripe kept their email intact but added structure such as advanced Gmail filters. Slack works for our team—it keeps us out of the inbox and frees up our time to work on more important projects. But what matters is finding an efficient communicationmodelforyouandyourteam.