Email Horror Stories: Why email is the silent killer this Halloween

Suppose you head out trick or treating or go to a party this Halloween. In that case, you’ll likely encounter people dressed up as classic killers like Freddy Krueger, The Joker and Jason Voorhees or mythical killers like vampires and zombies. You’re less likely to see someone dressed up as an email, despite the communication method being one of the most notorious business killers.

In fact, many people would have you believe that email itself is a ghoulish thing of the past. For example, a Fast Company guest article in 2007 proclaimed that “email is dead.” While in 2019, Slack CEO Stewart Butterfield declared that business email would die out “in the next two to seven years.”

Yet two years on from Butterfield’s claim, it may be time to call the Ghostbusters as email is not only still here but continuing to dominate all other forms of business communication (including Slack). Indeed, Statista data shows that 306.4 billion emails were sent daily during 2020, which is predicted to rise to 376.4 billion per day by 2025.

Email: The silent killer

Despite this colossal email usage, poor usage of the communication medium is killing business productivity. For example, our research of business leaders in the architecture, engineering and…