What will be after email?

“I think email is so archaic. It’s the bane of my existence.”–Robert Corrao, LAC GroupRobert Corrao has seven different Macs, an Apple TV, and of course an iPhone and an iPad to carry with him wherever he goes. The chief operating officer at LAC Group, a professional services company in Los Angeles, doesn’t mind loading himself down with technology, but he’s not always a fan of what it brings: Email, and plenty of it. He estimates he receives 500 emails a day–and that the average inbox in his organization contains 5000 emails. It’s all too much, and too little of it is important.

“It kills me,” he said. “Just deleting–not even reading–that still takes a good chunk of the day.”

So Corrao is leading his company on an effort to get rid of email–not the individual pieces that clutter up the inboxes, but email itself. LAC Group spent recent months experimenting with alternative ways of communicating and sharing information, testing everything from public social networks like Google+ to project management software like 37signals’ Basecamp to private networks like Salesforce’s Chatter.com.

“My pet project for the next year is to get us away [from email],” he said. “I think email is so archaic. It’s the bane of my existence.”

Corrao isn’t alone. The French company Atos made headlines last year when it completely banned internal emails. And the next generation of workers is proving email averse: The Pew Research Center reported in March that 63 percent of teens exchange text messages every day while just 6 percent exchanged email on a daily basis.

Email interruptions statisticBut is it really possible to do without email? To find out, Macworld surveyed Apple-savvy businesses and workers who have dramatically curtailed–or completely stopped–their use of this ubiquitous technology. To avoid overload, focus productivity, and even create a sort of virtual water cooler for employees, the trail-blazers have moved to a mix of video, chat, and social networking. Some solutions are imposed from the top; others grow up from the grass roots. And some wouldn’t exist without the possibilities created in recent years by the iPhone and iPad. Here’s how these businesses are making it happen.