Today’s email inbox is a Frankenstein of newsletters, invites, feedback, meeting requests, sales outreach, and all sorts of threads – getting into the hundreds a day.
It’s a mess.
And though you might have a half-hazard method to manage the volume, you know the best solution is to send and receive fewer emails.
Too Many Channels = Too Many Emails
There are ten billion emails sent within the US on a daily basis, with the average office worker sending about forty (and receiving 2-3 times that).
Emails are coming from colleagues, clients, and collaborators, very often as notifications from one of the many channels you’re working across.
But you don’t need stats to know your inbox is too clogged up.
When work is spread across too many platforms, channels, and apps, your inbox can start resembling a letter-sorting factory. All the more painful when those emails become long confusing threads with way too much back and forth.
The cognitive overload of a full inbox is not only a drain on your mental capacity, but it also slows down projects and hinders productivity. It causes confusion among collaborators and adds time to the creative process. Critical information gets lost in silos, versions get out of sequence, and without accountability, delays and missed deadlines are inevitable.
When Creative Feedback Leads to Siloed Communication
In the case of creative feedback (i.e. comments on docs, images, video, or other content), things can get especially tricky.
Feedback within these projects can be extensive, often with many people involved in the process and multiple versions of files. Relying on email threads is dangerous. Feedback turns into a game of broken telephone, getting lost in translation across messy threads where feedback becomes confusing and even conflicting.
Nobody knows what they’re responsible for in terms of creative tasks, and deliverables inevitably get delayed.
The following parts of creative project workflows are often done over email – and probably shouldn’t be:
- Creative feedback – Comments, annotations, and markups aren’t helpful when scattered in email threads and across multiple platforms.
- Replies to feedback in threads – Replying to feedback in email threads is a messy disaster. We’ve all done it. Choosing to highlight inline feedback in bold or italics or a different color – or perhaps all of the above.
- Comments that require precision – Precise comments should be made directly on the video, web page, or file.
- Tasks – Turning feedback into creative tasks shouldn’t require any copy and paste – this just opens things up to misinterpretation.
- EVERY update – You typically don’t need an email update for every single action. But you still want to have a record of what and why you are doing things a certain way.
- File sharing – Sending a file via email for feedback opens a can of worms and often gets you conflicting feedback and people working on the wrong versions. And there’s always inconsistent viewing experiences.
- Versioning – What’s the latest? Email is not ideal for tracking which version is current.
- Deadlines – There’s always someone who “didn’t see that email”.
- Approval management – Status update emails should be a thing of the past. Approvals should be connected to the file, not an email chain.
If you are sending any of the above emails in the creative process, you are not only getting emails you shouldn’t be getting, but your projects aren’t running efficiently.
Improving the Creative Project Structure to Reduce Emails
Using email and other communication tools like Slack or Teams is essential – as a method to direct you to a more appropriate platform.
Email is simply not a good method for communicating precise, creative related feedback throughout a project. It’s not organized. It’s not structured. It’s not collaborative. And it’s not interactive. It’s also nearly impossible to rely on for managing approvals.
Not only is email a poor method for managing feedback and approvals, but getting (and having to send) too many emails has a negative impact on productivity.
Reducing your reliance on email is a simple way of improving your overall creative project structure. Taking steps to manage notifications, approval workflows, and towards feedback clarity are great ways to start your inbox reduction.
How Collaborative Review and Approval Helps Creative Teams Reduce Emails
Utilizing tools and platforms intentionally designed for feedback will have a huge impact on the number of emails you’re dealing with on a daily basis. While we can’t help you hit “unsubscribe” on those 100s of sales pitches, ReviewStudio can help you effectively gather and manage feedback in a centralized place.
Keeping creative project feedback, tasks, and approvals all in one place means fewer emails, less confusing workflows, and faster approvals. Here’s how ReviewStudio helps creative teams reduce the number of emails in their inboxes.
1. Centralizing Project Files and Feedback
Getting email notifications and requests from a slew of asset management, project management, and communication platforms could be a big part of what’s clogging up your inbox. With ReviewStudio, you and your team, collaborators, and clients can keep project files, feedback, and approvals centralized in one, easy-to-access location.
2. Delivering Clear and Precise Feedback
That 50 email long thread where you are one of 15 people cc’d, with inline feedback added as it occurs to the sender in real time? Someone probably realized that it’s too long – so they started a brand new email thread (and repeat). Now all that feedback isn’t only spread across multiple chains, it’s confusing and hard to follow.
In ReviewStudio, commenting and media-specific markup tools let you deliver clear and precise feedback. All stakeholders can add their feedback or replies in real-time or on their own time.
With features like on-frame markup for video and text markup in PDF and documents, feedback is precise, clear, contextualized, and threaded.
3. Using Approval Automations
Automations can also help route project stages, rather than doing it through email threads. ReviewStudio’s approval workflow automations make it simple to keep projects on track, with each stage offering options for adding reviewers, approvers, deadlines, and reminders.
4. Maintaining Accountability
Eliminate those emails to clarify who’s responsible for what and when by setting up a system that maintains accountability for everyone involved in a project.
With assigned tasks, the person always knows what they’re responsible for. They know when it’s due. You know who approved what. A history of all versions is kept on hand for comparing feedback implementations or simply having a history to refer back to.
5. Sticking to Deadlines
Missed deadlines and deliverables are so frustrating – but very often hard to blame any stakeholders when it’s not clear what’s expected from whom and when. You can add accountability with automated deadline reminders, connected to the creative and feedback, saving time spent on the back and forth.
Integrating ReviewStudio with your preferred project management tool like Monday, Asana, or Wrike is yet another way to ensure creative tasks are aligned in the context of the overall project, keeping on track and creative flowing smoothly.
6. Managing Your Updates
Choosing which actions within a project require notification by email will significantly reduce the number on your inbox. Using the in-app notification feed and setting up notification preferences with digests ensures you’re staying on track, without getting overwhelmed by seeing things that don’t require your immediate or direct attention.
Fewer Emails With Online Proofing
Reducing email overload isn’t just about convenience, it’s about improving workflow efficiency, minimizing confusion, and keeping creative projects on track. With ReviewStudio, feedback, approvals, and task management are centralized, eliminating the need for long email threads, scattered updates, and version mix-ups.
Creative teams like Lixil are dealing with far fewer emails, thanks to ReviewStudio’s collaborative online proofing tools. And agencies like Elephant Skin benefit from the ability to share specific feedback, reducing the back and forth throughout projects.
To ditch the email chaos, leverage features like notification preferences, workflow automation, and precise markup tools. These let teams streamline collaboration and focus on creativity rather than inbox clutter. Fewer emails mean faster and smoother approvals, clearer communication, and a more efficient creative process.
