I certainly realise about yesterday’s lengthy blog post on last week’s progress report on my fighting work related e-mail, and since I am trying to cut them short, much shorter, actually, I really am trying, believe me, but it is proving to be quite a challenge (As you may have seen already!),  I thought I would venture today into sharing with you folks one quick, brief entry on a link that a good friend of mine, and fellow IBMer, shared with me earlier on today through e-mail (Ha! I know, too funny, too! heh).

Yes, I am just smiling about it, as I am writing this, because after I watched it, I am now even more convinced than ever before that I am on the right track, even though today hasn’t been a good day so far. But more on that this coming Friday. For now, I would like to invite you to check out the superb presentation that Matthew Milan put together in Slideshare, under the enticing title "Leading with Insight":

where you would be able to find gems like this one that pretty much describes what I am trying to achieve with all of this giving up on work related e-mail:

"To be insightful, you must embrace the following …

1. You must ask thoughtful questions
2. You need to look beyond the obvious
3. You shouldn’t be afraid to reframe the problem
4. You must learn to trust your gut"

Because after all "Insight is a state of mind … and a way of doing business"

Just spot on!

Tags: IBM, Collaboration, Remote Collaboration, e-mail, email, Social Software, Social Networking, Social Media, Social Computing, Web 2.0, Enterprise 2.0, Innovation, Knowledge Sharing, KM, Knowledge Management, Matthew Milan, Critical Mass, Leadership, Insight, Slideshare, Business

Phew! What a week!! One of the worst I have had in a long while with lots and lots of things happening in multiple various fronts, both at work and personal wise, including plenty of hectic activity all around. So busy that, as you may have noticed, I missed out, last Friday, putting together the weekly progress report on giving up e-mail. Basically, I just didn’t have enough brain cells left to write it and decided to leave it for some time during the weekend where things would slow down a bit. And they surely have, so here I am putting together this blog post where I will comment further on how week 7 of my fight against work related e-mail went by. Thus let’s get started!

Must say that this past week we are about to finish has been quite an interesting one, and for some folks it may as well be rather gratifying seeing some of the various results, while for others it will prove to be a bit disappointing. Either way, the end-result was actually something to blame on myself and I will explain why in the next few paragraphs. To start with, have a look into the report I am building up every week through the following screen shot:

As you may be able to see, week 7 has been the first one, since I got started with this experiment, where my incoming e-mails have gone up quite substantially. In fact, making a total number that by-passes the first initial week where I got everything started. Yes, that is right. This past week I have been receiving 47 e-mails, two more than the second highest number of e-mails per week for week 1. Ouch!!! Yes, I am sure you would agree with it. Rather painful! And a small drawback on to the overall initiative to give up on work related e-mail! I am sure you would agree with me as well on that one!

However, if you examine the results of the total numbers, it looks like we can see an increase of incoming e-mails towards the end of the week, whereas in previous weeks it was rather low. While updating the spreadsheet I was actually thinking and evaluating what may have gone wrong. I knew there must have been something that increased that number of e-mails. And lo and behold, after a few minutes on last Friday evaluating what happened and going through the mail archives, I figured out what actually happened.

To begin with I had a couple of one-on-one private e-mail communications where I needed to share information that I knew was going to remain of private nature. If you would remember, I mentioned at the very beginning that this kind of communications through e-mail would be the only one I would take and reply to through e-mail itself. The rest is out in the open, public online social computing spaces, whether internal or external to the corporate firewall.

Apart from this increase of one-on-one conversations, there was something else, however, that took a major hit and, believe it or not, it was my own fault. Yes, indeed, something that I realised about on late Friday afternoon and which should have never happened. Meetings!!! Yes, that is right, if you have been following me in Twitter over the last two to three days, you would remember how I have been mentioning all along what a couple of hectic days I had with meetings galore all over the place. Coming to 7 and 8 hour conference calls / meetings every single day for Wednesday and Thursday, respectively. And then, of course, Friday was a day of a massive catchup with some real work for the last three days!

And all of this resulted in me not being available as much as I usually am on various social computing spaces, so eventually people were thinking… "Well, since he is so busy with meetings I better send him an e-mail so that he can check it out after he is done, by which time I won’t be hanging around our mutual social computing spaces, and therefore he would reply back to me through e-mail!" Double OUCH!!!

Yes, that is how I felt about the whole thing, because, certainly, through Wednesday till Friday, that sudden increase if incoming e-mails was provoked by having just too many meetings put together under those days, which prevented me not being available to people, and then trying to catch up with everything else. Meaning that people couldn’t get through to me as they should have. And I suffered from it myself!

If you remember, last week the various different social computing tools weren’t as reliable as this week, where they have been working rather acceptable so far, yet, I failed to cut down on my incoming take of work related e-mails. And, like I have been saying all along, it is not the fault of the experiment itself, but more my own fault. Why? Because for the last few months I have been working with a specific approach where I treat very aggressively meetings & conference calls and just this week for those two days I was a bit more relaxed about it and it got out of control! Well, never again!!

At this very moment I am putting together a draft blog post that I will share this coming week on what that approach is like and how I have been using it for the last few months with an incredibly good success rate. It is probably not as controversial as my fighting work related e-mail. However, I can tell you that it is just as thought-provoking as what I have been doing with processing e-mails. You would have to wait for a few more hours before I release it to the world, but believe me, I know for sure that some people are going to love it and some others are just going to think like … what was he thinking about again?

The thing is that this isn’t anything new. I have been doing this with meetings, before I came into this new job I have had since November last year. However, it is just now that I am coming out public with it, so that folks would know what the deal is with me when processing conference calls and various meetings that people may set up! Thus stay tuned for more to come! And let’s see what happens this coming week as I am back again to my usual self, handling and working my way through meetings.

During this past week though, and touching briefly on some other lovely tidbits, I thought I would point out a couple of interesting links I have bumped into that surely explain why I am doing what I am doing and why there is no way back for me to continue working with e-mail. Yes, there are ups and downs, just coming through from one of those downs, but, hey still here going strong about the whole thing.

The first link is coming from Jeremiah Owyang who put together this lovely blog post a couple of days back that I can certainly encourage you to read, not only the original entry, but also the excellent commentary put together with lots and lots of interesting tips on how to process and work your way through e-mail. As you read further, it will come through to you the clear thought that e-mail is broken. Well, I wouldn’t go that far. E-mail is very much needed, we all know that, what I am just saying is that it needs to be re-purposed for what it was meant for in the first place many many years ago: a one-on-one communication tool to discuss and share information of a private, sensitive or confidential nature. For the rest, everything else should go into an online, public, open social software space where the conversation can certainly flourish much more profoundly than what you could do through e-mail!

And to give you an example of what I mean exactly with that, check out the fantastic (And must read!!) blog post put together by Wikinomics under the title "Wiki collaboration leads to happiness" (Courtesy from Chris Rasmussen) where you will find this wonderful graphic that clearly describes why I am giving up on work related e-mail and why despite potential hurdles there is no way for me to walk back. I saw the light in the past and not planning on giving up that easily:

And the same way that wikis are put into the spot in here, the same would apply to most of the various social computing tools available out there!

Finally, the last link I would want to share with you for now, is this particular blog post from Jon Mell titled: "Wikis as alternatives to email - find the ROI" (As a result of that, and a few other blog posts I caught up with, I have now subscribed to his blog and would certainly recommend you would, too, if you would want to find out how Enterprise 2.0 is helping shift gears within the corporate firewall!); in that article you can read the really fascinating business case he has put together to help validate my giving up on e-mail experiment providing as well some hard data, which would prove to be rather provocative, to say the least. Here it is:

"So we have a drop from 175-45 (75%) at the start and then a further 45-35 (22%) in the subsequent weeks. This has a significant impact for those who are looking for an ROI for internal Web 2.0 projects:

Time saved = 140 * 5 mins per email = 700 mins / 5 day week = 11h:40m. In a 40 hour working week lets say thats 25% to keep things easy (estimates that 25% of employees time is spent on email is not unfounded). Take a 30-man company with a £1,000,000 payroll, that’s a saving of £250,000 (ok, so I know it doesn’t quite work like that, but the point is that signifcant savings are available and this technology is effective even for small organisations)"

And if that is not enough, here is Jon’s conclusion, something that I wholeheartedly agree with and which explains why even though this week has seen a rather dramatic increase, I am not backing out just yet. On the contrary, now going further stronger than ever!:

"Not only that, but give each individual an extra 10 hours in their week and that’s more time sellers can sell, more time consultants can charge and more time R&D can innovate. You’ll gain much more than £250,000 on your top line than you’ll squeeze off the bottom line"

Need to add more? I doubt it.

(Thanks much, Jon, for putting together the business case on giving up e-mail and for sharing it with us all!)

Tags: IBM, Collaboration, Remote Collaboration, e-mail, email, Social Software, Social Networking, Social Media, Social Computing, Web 2.0, Enterprise 2.0, Innovation, Productivity, Conversations, Dialogue, Openness, Progress Reports, Knowledge Sharing, KM, Knowledge Management, Collaboration 2.0, Meetings, Conference Calls, Twitter, Jeremiah Owyang, Wikinomics, Chris Rasmussen, Wikis, Communication, Private, Confidential, Jon Mell, ROI, Return on Investment, Business Case, Business Value

TwitDir says that it is currently tracking 951,235 Twitter users. Yes, I know that for many other Web 2.0 applications available out there this sounds like peanuts, zero, nothing, zip, nada! However, if you come to think about it, having nearly one million end-users is way many more than what plenty of other applications would be aiming for. There is no doubt that Twitter is starting to grab more and more momentum as perhaps one of the most intriguing and wonderful social software tools available out there that helps people connect with one another way faster, whether we are talking here about knowledge workers, friends, family members, whatever, in order to share various different knowledge snippets.

In the area of Enterprise 2.0, we are seeing as well how more and more corporations are starting to make use of it, in order to break the firewall and connect with other knowledge workers, customers, business partners, etc. etc., with the end result of helping improve the already existing relationships or build / form new lasting ones. I am seeing that myself lately quite a bit within IBM, where in the last few days I have been able to connect with a whole bunch other IBMers who are starting to make use of Twitter in order to reach out beyond the firewall.

Yes, you may know already that we are experimenting, behind the firewall, with our own Twitter clone (Called BlueTwit), and perhaps I may be able to talk some more about it at a later time, since it is within my list of Top 10 social software tools to help me escape work related e-mail. However, there are still a whole bunch of us who are keen on breaking down the firewall and, at least, bring forward some of the different conversations outside in order to engage with customers and business partners, as well as other thought leaders in this space.

Still every now and then I keep bumping into people who keep questioning the validity of Twitter from a business perspective and although I do realise that most people who read this blog on a regular basis would not fall into that category I thought I would go ahead today and share with you some of the main reasons as to why as time goes by, day in day out, I am starting to rely more and more on Twitter as one of my main social software tools outside of the corporate firewall to keep in touch with colleagues, customers, business partners, thought leaders in the Enterprise 2.0 and Social Computing spaces and whoever else with whom I may share common interests.

Some time ago my good friend Ed Yourdon put together The Awesomeness of Twitter where he clearly stated a number of reasons, through telling a couple of anecdotes, on why Twitter is one of those social tools you just cannot ignore. Then, through Twitter, I got to find out as well how Dennis McDonald put together a very helpful blog post on how he is actually making use of Twitter in My Personal Twitter Rules So Far. We come pretty close to sharing most of the same rules, indeed! Funny, eh? Well, we actually never talked about them, but here we are both of us having very similar rules on how to work with Twitter (Although to me Twhirl rules!).

I am pretty sure there are a whole bunch of different Twitter related stories available out there for folks to digest, where its business value may have been proved over and over again. At least, Technorati seems to be thinking that way. However, I thought I would let you know about one particular blog post that another good friend of mine, Dennis Howlett, shared over at Social networking, IBM, Microsoft etc: the Twitterverse debates, where he captured, doing an incredibly good job, some of the conversations that a couple of days a bunch of folks, including myself, had in Twitter talking about social computing and its adoption within the corporate world; and discussed as well what could be done to break some of the barriers most of us may be facing at the moment.

It is a rather long blog post, but worth while every single line of it! What started as a single set of couple of comments here and there evolved into become a really fascinating discussion from people coming from various different companies, breaking our firewall, our organisational barriers, our wonderful differences, those well known timezone and geographical limitations and allow us to share our thoughts on that topic that we all are quite passionate about: social computing and its adoption within the enterprise. Yes, a unique experience, to say the least!

If you have a read of the blog post, at the very beginning, Dennis lists the group of folks who engage on that massive Twitter conversation. That would give you an idea of the variety and mix of the group and what we eventually talked about. Believe me, it is one of those blog posts that you will enjoy over a cup of coffee / tea on a rainy Saturday afternoon watching the time pass by. Priceless! And worth while a read!

So there you go! A bunch of really good stories that clearly prove the business value from Twitter and how corporations are going to benefit more and more by the day from making use of micro-blogging social software tools like Twitter. In my own personal experience, I can sense how IBM’s usage of Twitter is going to start growing exponentially, more than ever before, in order to reach out to, and collaborate with, customers and business partners. If you ask me why, I would probably say that the main reason being the superb Lotus Notes 8 plugin (Based on Eclipse) called TwitNotes put together by Mikkel Heisterberg and which is nicely integrated on the sidebar of the one tool that all of us keep using to check / process our e-mail: Notes 8.

Yes, that is right, IBMers would not need to leave their e-mail inboxes to keep up to date with what’s happening in the Twitterverse and still get a grip of what’s happening in that space. And I can see how you may be wondering … "Hang on for a minute, is Luis going to come back to e-mail again then, since he can now access Twitter from his inbox?" Well, not likely, I am still a big fan of Twhirl (As I mentioned earlier on) and will continue to use it just as heavily as I have been thus far, but it is rather nice to be able to quickly scan through e-mail to see how you are going to divert the public conversations into the social software tools and already get a sense of what is happening in Twitterland. Like you can see on this particular screen shot I took from my Notes 8.5 beta for the Mac:

Oh, and, finally, if you are one of those who is still pondering whether to dive into Twitter or not, because you are not sure just yet what the fuss is all about, you may want to have a look into one of the latest über excellent gems from Commoncraft; a 2′25′’ long video titled Twitter in Plain English put together, as usual, by the fine Lee and Sachi LeFever: 

Tags: TwitDir, Twitter, Micro-Blogging, Enterprise 2.0, Web 2.0, Collaboration, Remote Collaboration, Knowledge Sharing, KM, Knowledge Management, Social Computing, Social Networking, Social Software, Social Media, Communities, IBM, BlueTwit, Twitter Clone, Ed Yourdon, Dennis McDonald, Technorati, Twhirl, Twitterverse, Twitterland, Dennis Howlett, IBM, Microsoft, Social Software Adoption, Mikkel Heisterberg, TwitNotes, Notes, Lotus Notes, Notes8, Notes8.5, Mac, Beta, Commoncraft, Lee LeFever, Sachi LeFever, Plain English, Tutorials, Screencasts

Today has been one of those days where I should have probably taken the day off, seeing how busy things have been going from one meeting to the other and from one conference call to the next. Yuk!! Not the best way to spend what was starting, early in the morning, as a very productive day. And all of that because of me being a bit lenient with how I process meetings and conference calls for the last few months. That would teach me for the next time!! Perhaps now that I have been reporting on a weekly basis how I am processing work related e-mail I should go ahead as well and share with you folks how I eventually get to work with my weekly meetings. Quite an interesting approach, I can tell you, but that would be the subject for another upcoming blog post.

As you can imagine, my brain has got very few brain cells working properly after such an intensive day of meetings and the usual catchup afterwards (Thank goodness for e-mails not being one of the things to catch up with! heh), so I decided to create this entry with some light blogging to pick up the subject I initiated nearly a week ago, and which I mentioned I would eventually get to share with you every now and then. Yes, I am talking about the weekly blog post on Gran Canaria, the place where I have lived for the last four years, the place that keeps captivating me day in day out. No exceptions!

If last week I created a blog post where I shared some footage from a couple of recent video clips I recorded with my super fine Nokia N95 (Glad to know as well I am not the only one who thinks it is a really good experience!), here I am at it again, sharing the third video I recorded while nearly the very top of Roque Bentaiga, but this time around from the other side of the enclave. With quite a view, I can assure you!

If there would be one single word that I could make use of to describe such amazingly beautiful spot it would be humbling. And very much so! It’s just like time disappears, it is just you, up there, in the mountains, with hardly anybody around, facing the rock, your inner thoughts, your fears, your hopes, yourself and nature. Yes, I know, it probably cannot get better than that!

It is in days like today that I wish I had taken the day off and head over there to spend the day and disconnect from everything! It would have helped quite a bit get a new perspective on most things and I know that when coming back that sensation of peace and quiet is something that would make you feel fully re-energised and ready to go back at it! That kind of experience is Roque Bentaiga, folks. One of my favourite places in Gran Canaria to meditate, to forget about the world, to stop, breathe, relax, breathe again, and go back at it!

And you know, the best part of it all is that it is incredibly easy to reach out and access with very good roads all the way before you reach the bottom and start climbing up to the top. Yes, one of those special landmarks that even the lazy ones in all of us with our sedentary lives cannot deny going for …

So, yes, light blogging today, folks, but after watching the video (Yes, I still need to get the hangout of operating with the video camera! Not to worry, it will get better overtime!), you would understand why I put together this entry to help me escape the day that is just about to finish …

And with that, and without much further ado, here is the weekly video:

Roque Bentaiga - Part III

If a few days ago I was actually creating a blog post over here recommending folks to subscribe to the fine blog from Gia Lyons to get to find out some more about Lotus Connections and social computing for the enterprise (Amongst many other things!), here I am at it again, about to recommend a superb blog that has just made it outside of the IBM firewall and which I am sure would grab people’s attention, specially those folks interested in finding out some more about what IBM is doing with regards to social media experience on the ibm.com Web sites.

Remember the other blog post I put together as well not long ago on SMT’s IBM Case Study - From Employees to Members: IBM Connects With Social Media? Well, this particular blog I am going to be sharing over here next would go pretty much along the lines of some of the stuff you will see on that very same case study on how IBM is embracing social computing on the external ibm.com sites.

Yes, that is right! Check out Technical and Strategic Insight on the Present and Future of the ibm.com Website to get a glimpse of what I am talking about here. I am sure that the first thing you are going to say is "What a long long name for a blog! Goodness!" and you would be right. It is also a bit too long for my taste, but if you go beyond that and if you check out some of the already existing blog posts, you would agree with me that this is one of those blogs that you will be subscribed to, if you are into social media and what large enterprises like IBM are doing. Here is an excerpt of what the blog is about:

"Insights from the ibm.com team; a diverse group of people with a unique depth and breadth of experience in developing and managing a complex large enterprise site. The team will address many of the technical and managerial challenges associated with running such a large and complex website; focusing on the innovative solutions the team has or will be deploying. Topics covered will be diverse, ranging from asynchronous java and security to innovation in Agile and website accessibility."

With that introduction I bet a bunch of folks out there would be interested in syndicating its content. The good thing is that I know a couple of folks behind the actual blog and I can certainly share with you the kind of outstanding quality you are going to find there! Right now you will be able to find the names and positions held within IBM from each of the bloggers and a way to interact with them if you would want to add comments to their own blog posts.

Thus without much further ado, here is the first of many blog posts that I am sure you would find pretty interesting and engaging, to say the least: Test environments on the enterprise web. Drop by, say "Hi!" and get some dialogue going! It surely promises to be an interesting one! And me? What can I say? … Already subscribed!

Tags: IBM, Lotus Connections, Connections, Gia Lyons, ibm.com, SMT, Social Media Collective, Case Study, Social Media, Social Computing, Social Networking, Social Software, Web 2.0, Enterprise 2.0, Collaboration, Communities, New Media, Metablogging, Blogging, Blogroll, Recommendations, Social Software Adoption, Knowledge Management, Knowledge Sharing, KM, Innovation

Last week, in a very interesting and enlightening blog post, Ross Mayfield, Chairman, President & Co-founder of Socialtext, and who I had the great pleasure of meeting up in person while in Lotusphere 2008, mentioned how he is taking a very provocative turn into expanding further with his adoption of wikis in the corporate world, not only to enhance the overall knowledge sharing and collaboration experiences, but also as a way to try to escape e-mail. And in so doing it by making use of his Out of Office (Or auto-responder) indicating folks how to best reach out to him, while he is away. And he does it via a wiki, of course!

What an AWESOME idea!!! Just brilliant! For someone like myself who is also trying to divert some of those different public conversations coming through e-mail, this is perhaps one of the best tips I can think of in my on-going fight against such work related e-mail. My immediate team is currently making use of a wiki, so you probably know where I am going to create my Vacation Message Page. I seriously think that this could be one amazing idea worth while exploring and I am surely going to try it out. Go into my team’s wiki, create a specific page for Vacation Messages and encourage everyone in my team and, through my Out of Office message, everyone else to come over and share what they would want to get my attention on when I am back.

No more e-mails. No more e-mail quotas exceeded. No more stress having to sort out hundreds of e-mails. No more having that feeling of wasting your first or second day of productivity. Just pure delight! Just productive on first day back, first thing in the morning! More than anything else, because there is a great chance that if someone updates that wiki page wanting my attention when coming back, perhaps one of my colleagues may be able to chime in between and help out, while I am away. Of course, it works both ways, when they are gone themselves, I will be chiming into that wiki page and try to help out sharing and providing the necessary info.

Yes, I know! Mind-blowing!!! I am *so* going to try this out next time I am away, which happens to be in mid-April, so will keep you all updated on it! For sure. What’s also interesting in Ross’ blog post is how he is also sharing how he is making use of external applications like Facebook, Twitter and wikis to close some deals during this quarter! Boy, and then they tell me that all of this social software cannot be used to conduct business as productively as you can, if not more, than with e-mail! Ha! Well done, Ross!! Thanks for sharing and showing us the way as well!!

However, one other item I found interesting was his auto-responder message, which clearly points out something I have been doing myself over the last few weeks: Don’t send me an e-mail while I am away, because it’s the last thing I am going to check, if at all. Find me in social software spaces instead!

So for the sake of sharing the one I have been using myself lately, here is my current auto-responder that gets sent out to every single person who sends me an e-mail while I am away:

"I will be out of the office till the 25th of March

During that time, I will have very limited access to both e-mail and voicemails, so would only be able to check them once a day, at the end of the day, and only for urgent, private or IBM confidential messages.

In order to help avoid running into mail jail while I am away, every single e-mail larger than 300kb will be deleted without even looking at it! Please resend again on the week of the 24th of March. Thanks!

And if you have been reading my "Giving up on e-mail" new mantra, LINK HERE, you will know by now that e-mail is the last thing I check & respond to. Find me instead in IBM’s top social software tools… (Sametime, Connections, WikiCentral, Beehive, BlueTwit, Cattail, etc.) for a faster response while I am away.

If you have any questions regarding SUCH & SUCH please do contact JOE DOE

Alternatively, if you have got questions regarding the SUCH & SUCH team please do contact JOE DOE

Regards
Luis Suarez"

Yes, I know. It is a long read for an auto-responder message, but you would agree with me that it gets straight to the point of how people can reach me faster while I am away, while keeping them informed of how they can get to the rest of my teams and the one and only exception while I still check e-mail for. And you know what the greatest thing about this whole thing is? Well, that little by little, I am starting to see some of my work colleagues using similar Out of Office messages, if not much more drastic altogether. And, that, folks, is a good thing!

The word is getting out. People are reacting and challenging their work related e-mails and finding better ways of reaching out and connecting with other knowledge workers. And all of that through social software and not through e-mail!

(I just cannot help smiling, while putting together this blog post, how I have been away celebrating Easter and having a well deserved long weekend break, including today, Easter Monday, and the count of e-mails so far is on 5 e-mails! It is working, slowly, but steadily! Finally beating work related e-mail to suit my needs and not vice versa! Tomorrow morning, first thing, I’ll be productive once again!) 

Tags: IBM, Collaboration, Remote Collaboration, e-mail, email, Social Software, Social Networking, Social Media, Social Computing, Web 2.0, Enterprise 2.0, Innovation, Productivity, Conversations, Dialogue, Openness, Knowledge Sharing, KM, Knowledge Management, Collaboration 2.0, Easter, Ross Mayfield, Lotusphere2008, Socialtext, Wikis, Vacation Message Page, Facebook, Twitter, Auto-responder, Out of Office, Lotus Sametime, Sametime, Lotus Connections, Connections, WikiCentral, Beehive, BlueTwit, Cattail, Easter Monday, Holiday, Vacation