Can email survive in a social media world?

Instant messaging is growing fast. WhatsApp boasts 500 million active users, and WeChat has 438 million. The former is owned by social media giant Facebook, with an astonishing 1.32 billion users, and Twitter (500 million) and the much-maligned Google+ (340 million) are doing well, too.

In all the furore over new forms of communication, surely email is dead, right? Not so. The number of email users will increase from about 2.5 billion now to more than 2.8 billion in four years, according to The Radicati Group in California.

At work we send 108.7 billion emails a day, a figure that will rise to 139.4 billion by 2018, it says. There is, however, a feeling that email is used by workplaces only because there's not yet a commonly used alternative. "Email is notorious for hijacking productivity," says Greg Wright, managing director at AtTask, a workflow and collaboration service company.

"Although it originally opened the door to greater efficiency and scalability, in the workplace, we are plagued by a flood of wasteful redundancy, confusion and useless information."

Wright calls it a vicious cycle, pointing out that although we act like victims of our own inbox, we all add to the problem. "We often use email to avoid talking to real people or getting started on a top priority task," he says. "The result is constant disruption and actions slipping through the cracks."