E L S U A ~ A KM Blog Thinking Outside The Inbox by Luis Suarez

Giving up on Work e-mail – Status Report on Week 46 (Living without Email – One Man’s Story. Are you Next?)

This is probably going to be my last blog post of this year 2008; a year that will mark a before and an after as far as my own adoption of social software is concerned, both inside and outside of the company I work for: IBM. A year that will be very difficult to forget for so many things! A year that nearly 12 months ago I had no idea it would develop into what it has finally turned out to be!

Far too many things happened to talk about them all over here in just a single entry and while everyone gets busy with their summary of this year and their predictions for 2009, I am, however, going to save you all of that hassle and just sum it all up with a single highlight on what 2008 has been and with what 2009 will be; at least, for me:

“A World Without Email!“

Yes, that’s right! A world without email! But I am not going to spoil things further. At least, not just yet. Most of you folks who have been following this blog already have got an idea of what I have been doing for most of this year on the topic of Thinking Outside the Inbox, while giving up e-mail at work, but what you may not know is that next year I will be back for more. But with a twist! A slight change of plans that I am hoping to share with everyone shortly on what I would be doing next …

But I am not going to reveal it just yet. You will have to wait for another couple of days. However, for today, and for this last blog post of the year, I thought I would share with you the last weekly progress report before end of the year (There will be another one for this current week we are going through next week, by the way!), which, on its own, will mark a huge massive milestone on what I have been doing for the last eleven and a half months! And you will see why by checking out the report itself:

Yes, indeed! As you will be able to see from the report, I have hit a new low of incoming e-mails in a single week. For week 46, i.e. last week, I have received a total number of 3 e-mails! You are reading it right! 3 e-mails!!!

I know you are going to say “Hang on, last week it was Christmas! It was supposed to be quiet anyway, right?” Well, that may well be the case, but think about the amount of e-mails you got yourself. Probably with a significant slow down of incoming e-mails, for sure. But 3? And what’s even better, and here is where the milestone kicks in, all of those 3 e-mails I have received was actually Christmas eCards!!! Which means, that last week, for the first time EVER!, I have managed to not receive ANY work related e-mails!!! Whooooaaaahhhh! (Massive!)

It has taken me 46 weeks, but I have finally made it! I have finally been able to prove the point that you can go by a week without using e-mail, but social software, and still get the job done! And all of that having a stronger sense of being productive with my immediate team(s) / communities and the rest of the company. So, I guess it is time for me to embark into my next challenge … (Yes, that one I will be talking about shortly and which will have a significant impact on this blog overall. But that would be something to share at a later time …)

For now though, I would want to wrap up this blog post pointing you folks to a (recent) lovely blog post that my good friend Steve Rubel (Who I have finally had the pleasure of meeting him up earlier in the year face to face, in Hamburg, at Next08) put together from a recent webcast we did together for Edelman’s Change & Employee Engagement explaining further more what it is like “Thinking Outside the Inbox“. You can read the article over here: Living without Email – One Man’s Story. Are you Next?

There is also a YouTube video (See embedded video below) from our Skypecast conversation that lasts a little bit over two minutes, but the interesting thing, I would think, would be the longer version of that conversation, which you can go ahead and download from the following URL: Edelman’s Change & Employee Engagement – Steve Rubel Interviews Luis Suarez on “Thinking Outside the Inbox“ (40 minutes) where you would be able to listen to some further insights on what I have been doing all along and also shared a few tips on how you, too, can tame the e-mail beast!

And that would be it for me for this year, folks. A very exciting and unforgettable year already preparing what’s about to start, if not, already, in just a few hours from now … Happy New Year everyone! Hope 2009 will bring you all plenty of health, prosperity & peace!

Tags: Enterprise 2.0, Social Software, Social Networking, Social Computing, Social Media, Collaboration, Communities, Learning, Knowledge Sharing, KM, Knowledge Management, Remote Collaboration, Innovation, IBM, Networking, Social Networks, Social Networks, Networking, Conversations, Dialogue, Connections, Relationships, e-mail, email, Productivity, Communication, Re-purposing E-mail, No-Email, Challenge Your Inbox, Progress Reports, Thinking Outside the Inbox, Information Overload, A World Without Email, Steve Rubel, Edelman, Next08, Hamburg, Germany, Change, Employee Engagement, YouTube, Skype, Christmas, New Year, 2008, 2009, Health, Prosperity, Peace

Giving up on Work e-mail – Status Report on Week 44 to 45 (The Yo-Yo Effect Continues)

As we are about to wrap up another interesting and exciting year, and while we await for 2009 (Just around the corner!), here I go back again into creating another blog post over here trying to catch up with the weekly progress reports on how I have been doing lately giving up e-mail at work. I am sure that a few of you folks would be interested in finding out some more on how things are going or whether there may have been some drastic changes. Thus here I am again at it, sharing with you a few thoughts on what has happened for weeks 44 and 45. At the same time I will be sharing with you another interesting link I have bumped into a little while ago and which is very much related to "Thinking Outside the Inbox" theme. But one thing at a time …

In one of my recent blog posts on the subject, I mentioned how over the last few weeks I seem to be have been going through what I have been calling the yo-yo effect (i.e. an up and down incoming number of e-mails per week) and it looks like these two weeks are a continuation of that effect, because, once again, the numbers have been going up and down. Here are the progress weekly reports, so that you folks can have a look:

As you would be able to see, during week 44 I eventually got 23 e-mails, whereas for week 45 I ended up with 35. Rather intriguing to see how the numbers fluctuate, but equally interesting to see how all of that yo-yo effect changed dramatically for week 46. But that would be the subject for another upcoming blog post. For now, just to reflect how the numbers keep going up and down, but steady under the 35 e-mails range per week, which, I guess, it is not too bad! But till you get to read through the progress report from week 46 and you will see what I mean…

Finally, like I have mentioned at the beginning of this blog post, I would also like to take a couple of minutes to point you to a very relevant article, even though it was published a couple of months back!, to what I have been doing all along in this space. It was published by Amit Agarwal under the title "How to Manage Email Overload with some help of your RSS Reader" and in it it comes to mention how one of the most compelling methods for taming your e-mail inbox is to eventually move out information flows into RSS / Atom feed readers.

If you have been listening to a couple of videos I have shared on this subject of giving up on e-mail at work, you would know how, to me, an RSS / Atom feed reader has become an essential tool in helping me digest the information / knowledge I get exposed to from my various different social networks. Without my feed readers (Yes, I use a couple of them!) I am 100% sure I would not have been able to successfully move away from corporate e-mail, to the extent that without them I doubt I would be getting much work done!

Thus to such extent Amit has put together a worth while reading article where you would be able to get exposed to four different tips on how RSS feeds would be able to help you manage e-mail overload much better, to the point where you can eventually reduce a substantial amount of the messages you get exposed to on a daily basis. I am not going to expand much further on the subject, but, instead, I would like to quote over here those four tips and would then encourage you all to have a look into Amit’s entry for the rest:

- Idea 1: "Ask people to only send tips via delicious for: tag" (Or any other social bookmarking site for that matter!)
- Idea 2: "Only use contact forms that provide RSS feeds
- Idea 3: Master Dapper and Yahoo! Pipes
- Idea 4: Read all e-mail newsletters and mailing lists as RSS feeds" (This is perhaps my favourite one! You can’t imagine the huge amount of e-mail traffic I have been able to divert ever since I started with this experiment!)

See? It is not that difficult to take control over and tame the e-mail beast, right? Well, stay tuned, because very soon I will be putting together a new blog post where I will share some of the changes of what you will be seeing over here for the year we are about to begin within the next few hours… For the time being, get ready for the upcoming blog post, because it surely is going to shake the ground a bit!

Tags: Enterprise 2.0, Social Software, Social Networking, Social Computing, Social Media, Collaboration, Communities, Learning, Knowledge Sharing, KM, Knowledge Management, Remote Collaboration, Innovation, IBM, Networking, Social Networks, Social Networks, Networking, Conversations, Dialogue, Connections, Relationships, e-mail, email, Productivity, Communication, Re-purposing E-mail, No-Email, Challenge Your Inbox, Progress Reports, Thinking Outside the Inbox, Information Overload, RSS, Atom, Feeds, Newsfeed Readers, Readers, Aggregators, Amit Agarwal, Delicious, Dapper, Yahoo Pipes, Newsletters, Productivity Tips

¡¡¡Feliz Navidad 2008!!!

You may have noticed how over the last few days, and after the massive piece of news I shared a couple of weeks back (By the way, thanks ever so much everyone! for the lovely comments!), things have gone a bit quiet over here, once again. And must confess that has happened due to several reasons which I am shortly going to detail over here, so that you know what I have been up to so far heh

To start with I have been on holidays (Still am till the beginning of the New Year!) and although I have been having a good rest and almost in disconnected mode from everything, I have been rather busy having to handle all of the paperwork of the country transfer from IBM Netherlands to IBM Spain and, believe me, it hasn’t been an easy task, specially since one of the weeks I have been away already has been rather hectic. Through e-mail!! Who would have thought about that, eh? But not to worry, I will be sharing some further insights on that shortly, as part of the weekly progress reports, which I am running a couple of weeks behind, I know. But we will eventually get there, I am sure.

I have also been rather busy catching up with folks offline, specially during this time of the year where everyone seems to pause for a little while and have a chance to enjoy some peace and quiet, reflect on the year about to finish and treasure what each and everyone of us has or what we may have been involved with lately. What in Twitter I have been calling beers&friends, if you know what I mean.

But if there is a single reason why I have gone a bit dormant over here and why I think it is still going to be like that for another couple of days, is because, as some of you may already know, I am already working on what will be happening in 2009 for me, as far as Thinking Outside the Inbox is concerned. I am putting together a new theme, a new master presentation deck, a new pitch, something really cool that will be happening to one of my blogs (http://elsua.net) and which will impact the other two I am currently maintaining and that has been keeping me far too busy to blog about it overall. At least, for now.

I hope that very soon I will be able to unleash some really interesting piece of news happening with http://elsua.net and that will be the kick-off for 2009 for everything related to elsua. Thus stay tuned for plenty more to come up very shortly!

For now though I just couldn’t help coming over here for a few minutes and share with you folks some those special wishes we all have been exchanging all over the place and which I am sure are getting you into the spirit of the special times we are going through. Yes, indeed, it is Christmas!!! Yay! (But you already knew that!)

That’s why I just want to wish you all a Merry Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year, with plenty of good Health and Prosperity for 2009!!! And also want to take this opportunity to give you a special thanks! for sticking around and for dropping by every now and then over here in this blog and for sharing plenty more insights that I would have ever hoped for and help contribute into some of the conversations we have been having all along. Without them, I am sure things would have been completely different. So here I am, taking a couple of minutes to thank you all for those contributions and hope that we can keep the dialogue going throughout 2009!

Till then, all the very best for you and your loved ones in this special time of the year and here is to a wonderful 2009!!!

Tags: Navidad, Feliz Navidad, Christmas, Merry Christmas, Spain, Las Palmas, Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, Playa Las Canteras, Flickr, Pictures, Life, Work, elsua, Thinking Outside the Inbox, 2009, 2008, IBM, Christmas Tree, Holidays, Sun, Fun, Special Times