Using Email for Storing Business Information is Dumb

You know you should be using email exclusively for sending messages. The to and fro of deliberately ignored messages is what email is intended for 😝. But if you’re anything like the 88% of people who encounter email on a daily basis, you probably use email for purposes other than sending and receiving mails. I don’t blame you, email apps and services have become all kinds of fancy lately – snazzy filing features, pretty decent search, flags, labels you name it… it’s no wonder you’ve promoted your once-lowly email app to the esteemed role of “digital safe.”

If you use a half decent email service (say.. Gmail) and an equally sturdy email client, then you’ve had little reason to abandon email for storing and occasionally accessing your digital information.

RIDDLE ME THIS… HAVE YOU EVER CONSIDERED AN ALTERNATIVE TO EMAIL FOR ENTRUSTING YOUR CRITICAL BUSINESS INFORMATION TO?

Assuming this question is one worth considering, two factors would have to hold true:

1. Email must have inherent shortcomings in adequately fulfilling this function, and
2. There should be an alternative out there that has all the features with none of the shortcomings…sorta like a binge without the regret the next morning

Before we get ahead of ourselves, let's consider why email is a less-than-stellar choice for entrusting your critical business information to it:

• Email isn’t designed for offline access. Even if you make use of a dedicated email client like Microsoft Outlook or Apple Mail, the odds of that one bit of content you’re hoping to work on during your flight being available is hit and miss (at best).
• Email and version control don’t belong in the same sentence. Let’s paint a picture I’m willing to bet you’ll recognise… You have an email with an important doc in it. You’ve downloaded the doc to your desktop to make some critical corrections to it before sending it on. Months pass and as luck would have it, a situation arises requiring you to retrieve your old document. But alas, Murphy’s Law is a thing, and the version you desperately need *isn’t* the version you have safely hoarded away in your email client, the version you’re after is the one you made your last minute final changes to. It goes without saying that the version you need disappeared in your last desktop spring clean and no longer exists because, as you and I both know, Murphy is a beeatch.
• Search within email clients is skin deep. Here’s another scenario: Ruth gives you a call: “looks like the proposal I have on hand has the outdated figures, do you mind popping the latest version to me?” You confidently jump into “ol’ trusty” and in a manner of seconds have brought up 50 emails you’ve sent to Ruth in the past six months, all of which have proposal in their subject line. It then dawns on you… there is no way of searching the contents of the documents attached to each email, a feeling of dread washes over you as you realise the next 45 minutes are a write-off.

 

YOU NEED NOT SUFFER

Ok it stands to reason that relying on email for critical business information is dumb. Evernote kicks your email service’s ass for storing, searching and accessing business information for several reasons. Let’s highlight a few:

1. Offline access. If you’re using any Evernote desktop client (or mobile clients for Evernote Plus and Evernote Premium users), you have the ability to take advantage of offline access. Your flight just became productive again. Cheers all round!
2. Document-level search. I don’t know about you, but now matter how carefully worded my document titles are, I often find that the information I’m looking (and searching for) is inside the document’s content itself. You don’t have to resign yourself to opening and closing countless documents ever again.
3. Tagging. Filing is for grannies and tax professionals, tags are arguably the most flexible and capable methods of categorising related information I’ve ever come across (hmmm… if only some people I know shared those traits).
4. PDF and image annotations. Printers and scanners the world over are being unnecessarily overworked by business professionals who insist on printing entire PDFs out, only to highlight the three changes they need on Pages 7, 9 and 11 – thanks to Evernote’s integration of Skitch, there is a better way*

*This feature is exclusive to Evernote Plus, Evernote Premium and Evernote Business.