Once thought of as a tool to speed up communications, email is now slowing business down. Conversations once had in person or on the phone have moved to the internet. Instead of communicating with your colleagues, prospects and clients in person, the masses have moved to the informal use of email. This creates many challenges today. The two most prevalent are time spent on multiple emails of the same content sent countless times and the trend of communications becoming conversations.

The solution is simple, declare bankruptcy! Lawrence Lessig first wrote three steps to cleaning up your inbox.

1. Collect the email addresses of everyone you haven’t replied to. Paste them into the BCC field of a new message you’ll send to yourself.
2. Write a polite note explaining your predicament. Apologize profusely – Lessig managed five mea culpas in as many paragraphs – and promise to keep up with your email in the future. Try to sound credible.
3. Ask for a resend of anything particularly pressing, and offer to give such messages special attention.

To expand on this idea, I would offer these additional steps to get your inbox back in order.

Migrate your communications to a blog.

This simple step will allow you to more effectively communicate by placing content meant for multiple people in one central location. For example, updates on products or pricing, even in the research stage, should be done with transparency. Allowing your base to see where you are going is the best and most cost effective way to ensure you are heading in the right direction.

Direct your sphere to the right place.

Adding to the idea of BCC list or sphere list, announce that you are looking to expand the channels of communication. A blog is a simple and pure public forum. They make it extremely easy to participate and the dialog found in the comments section usually wind up being more valuable then the original message.

Make “You’ve Got Mail” a happy message again.

We have become desensitized to new mail. Just as businesses have become overwhelmed in responding in a timely manor, recipients have lost the patience. Just as a car alarm going off does not get a second look these days, the importance of email is so low that most valuable communications are lost in the pack. By moving your “housekeeping” items to a public place, you can train your sphere to accept and appreciate communications directly from your firm. With such poor standards by most firms in drip email campaigns or email blasts, these tools for the most part are not effective. While countless articles can critique on what type of content makes an effective email, all improvements are useless if they never open up the communication in the first place.

Authored by Chris Daley.