We don’t need to kill email.

Here’s the deal: as much as people want email to be dead and gone, that’s not going to happen. Since the time we first started using the internet to network with people, email has been around to assist us in our need to communicate. Over time, as our communication needs change, email remained by our side, growing and adapting to our needs. So why are we in such a hurry to kill it?

I’m not saying that email is perfect. There are many things about email that is frustrating and that we sometimes wish we could change. One aspect would be that it is just way too cluttered and if we don’t manage our email right, chances are we will end up with a mess on our hands.

Think about your email workflow. Have you been using it in the most productive way possible? If you’re like most people, myself included, there is a big chance you haven’t — not everyone can be bothered to sort different emails into colored labels. In fact, independent studies have shown that most of us only use about 20 percent of our email’s potential.

If you’re just the average person, it is likely that you are using email for your regular Facebook notifications — things you don’t really care much about. It is safe to say that the only people really bothered by the inconveniences of the current emailing system are businesses, or, to be specific, their employees. But even in this context, would one really have to spend time reorganizing his or her email and creating labels to be more productive? Possible and helpful as that may be, it sounds like a tough habit to get used to. There is one thing a business can do to de-clutter an employee’s inbox;

Stop using email for internal communication!

Let’s start with the basics, what is the difference between internal communication and external communication? Internal communication refers to everything that happens within a company. This could include conversations between employees, managers, directors and even departments. External communication on the other hand is all the conversations that take place with people outside the company, such as other businesses, clients, customers, government agencies and what not.

If you’ve ever worked in a medium to large business, you know how annoyingly spread out internal conversations can be. You start a conversation on email, you end up moving to skype and then crossover to some other platform and later on when you’re trying to look for something that you spoke about with your colleague, it’s lost in a plethora of unsearchable text.

And that’s where the problem with email lies. Now you must be thinking, why not just have all your communication restricted to email only? If we use email for internal communication, chances are someone or the other is getting left out of the loop. Maybe you forgot to CC that person or maybe the email just got lost in their inbox, whatever the reason may be, email isn’t really that reliable.

And that’s not the only issue. By using email for internal conversations, we are intentionally adding clutter to our external communication. Having an inbox with messages from your co worker about her new cat in the same place as a message regarding an urgent contract that needs to be signed today could lead to a lot of unnecessary clutter taking up screen space, and the important email may just get lost somewhere.

So what to do?

If you are looking to replace email for your internal communication, take some time and find the program or platform that suits your company’s needs. Don’t make the mistake of relying on consumer solutions like Skype and Facebook, as simple as they may feel — mainly because most employees would already have a Facebook or Skype id — try and go with a platform that’s focused toward enterprise users as they provide additional functionality such as a good search option, separate rooms for different conversations and even integration with other project management software that you may use.

Programs such as Slack allow you to separate conversations into specific topics, integrates with programs such as dropbox, google drive and virtually any other software your company may use and has apps for mobile and desktop. Alternatives such as flowdock provide employees with a full real-time view of what’s going on, while allowing them to quickly jump into a specific thread so that they can focus on that one topic that needs attending to.

Not only can cleaning up communication help with allowing employees to focus more, it can also help some employees feel more included. Think of that one employee that’s new and is shy to join in on conversations in the office, adding them to the conversation can give them an idea of how the company works and what’s been going on as well as give them the confidence to join in on a conversation. So if you’re running a business or even working at a company that has a pretty messy structure for internal communication, why not take one step closer to productivity.

This article previously appeared on The Jakarta Globe