Stop emailing attachments: one document, one source of truth

Here’s the failure mode. You email a document to three colleagues for input. They each reply with their edits attached. Now there are four versions, none of them complete, and someone has to merge them by hand while hoping they didn’t miss a comment.

The cause is the attachment. It’s a snapshot — the instant you send it, it’s out of date.

Share a link instead

Both Google Workspace and Microsoft 365 let you share a link to a file that lives in one place. Everyone opens the same document. Edits and comments happen in it, visible to all, with a full history. There’s no merging because there’s only one version.

The habits that make it work

• Files live in a shared drive, not on someone’s laptop. A link to a file only you can see isn’t a link, it’s a request.
• Set the right permission once. “Anyone in the company can comment” is a sensible default for most working documents.
• Reply in the document, not the email. Comments belong where the work is.
• Send the link, then a one-line email if you need to — “draft’s ready, comments by Thursday” — rather than the file itself.

The exception

Send an actual file when the recipient is outside your organisation and you want them to have a fixed, final copy — a signed contract, a submitted proposal. Everything that’s still being worked on should be a link.

What changes

Less time merging, no “which version is current”, and a document whose history you can actually trace. It’s a small change in habit with an outsized effect on a team.