Is email for old people?

My lovely children, especially the three younger ones, often tell me that email is for old people. While I do use email a lot for work, I am now wondering whether it is outliving its usefulness.

I was at the BOOST conference for 3 days last week and then spent Saturday taking a judo team I coach to a joint practice. So, when I sat down to read my email, I had 4,364 unread emails.

Gompers Judo Team visits Guerreros Judo at Bishop Amat High School

With 3,224 emails down, here is how it panned out

• 2 opened and wrote a response
• 7 opened, read the information, no response required
• 1 opened, thought we might be interested in event & forwarded to the appropriate person in our company
• 1 read notice of planned down time for supplier in preview. Duly noted.
• 1 opened, thought we might be interested but decided cost was more than I wanted to pay for event
• 1 opened, thought we might be interested in event, but reading further, decided it wasn’t useful for us
• 12 read first sentence in preview and decided it was too far away or I was busy that day and did not open
• 3,199 deleted without reading past the subject line and sender

So, 0.3% of these emails contained any useful information. I’ve ben asked why I bother with email. In fact,I have some accounts that I never even open because the content to spam ratio is so low. These 4,364 email messages came from the three I do use.  Since I noted that all of the emails that were useful in that account could be dealt with someone else, I just delegated that account to our new intern (Hi, Irma!)

Fortunately, I read fairly quickly, so I can scan through 3,000+ lines in under 20 minutes, but it’s still a pain. I can understand why no one reads email any more (according to my children) . Still, I can’t think of a better way to learn about possibilities to pitch our company to investors – I can’t go to every angel investor and venture capital site every day. I can’t think of a better way to get people information about sales or discounts on games. I don’t think they would appreciate a text with the link to our latest newsletter.

Have you done away with email altogether? Is it going the way of the fax machine?  What do you use instead?
When I’m not wondering about email, I’m making games like Fish Lake. Buy it here. On sale this month for only $8.99. You’ll have fun and learn stuff.