Email. Why bother? Because I don't know what else to do.

I love collaborating with others and working in teams when everyone (or most everyone) is engaged in the project. I find it energizing and inspiring, and a lot of fun.
Of course, that's once everyone gets together. The issue I'm running into more and more lately is getting everyone together. Not just physically, but even virtually. And I'll admit, I'm just as bad- if not the worst- about this as anyone else.

At one time, email was the way to go. Yahoo and Google groups worked fantastically to organize groups of emails and store and archive of messages, and everyone on the list could easily communicate to everyone else quickly. But recently something odd has begun to happen.

Emails get sent, but not replied to. In my own inbox, despite the priority flagging that Gmail has been nice enough to do for me, I ignore emails. In fact, I go days without checking my email. I don't think I'm the only one- I've sent emails to groups asking for even a response saying that the email was received (knowing of course that each person had to confirm their email to join the group) and been greeted with silence in return. This is a problem when trying to collaborate with multiple people who have very different work and sleep schedules.

So what are other options? I've tried Google docs, texting, Facebook groups, Facebook messages and wall posts, email + text, instant messaging... all with limited to no success. I'm having this issue in my personal life- I can't even imagine how anyone handles this in a remote office situation where you can't just get up and walk to someone's desk! Obviously there are some awesome paid collaboration tools out there, but if I can't reach my co-collaborators where they hang out anyway, I'm not holding out much hope for them making a purposeful trip to a separate tool.

So I'm stuck. Individually, Facebook, Twitter, and texting work great for me and easily beat out email as the best way to share information with me. One of my friends has figured out if there's a lot of info to go ahead with an email, then text me that she sent it. But the abundance of choice in communication has given us just that- an abundance of choice. This means that we will continue to face increasing challenges when it comes to collaboration, and it will be increasingly important to define the channels of communication at the beginning of a project. And I don't just mean get everyone to nod and say "ok yeah, we'll email about that", I mean get everyone to commit to the method and agree to respond or post or whatever- leaving it open will leave you open for frustration and possible failure and nobody wants that.