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 12

Goodness! I cannot believe it’s been three months already! Three months since my working life became ever so much more productive than ever before! Three months since I decided that enough was enough and made the blunt move of giving up on e-mail, i.e. work related e-mail. Three months since I decided that it’s about time social software gets a chance to enhance the way I work. And, boy, has it surely been quite a ride! They say that time flies when you are having fun, and, as I am putting together this blog entry with the weekly progress report, I guess that certainly has been the case.

As I have mentioned at the beginning of the week, this was going to be quite an interesting week, since for the first time in 11 years I have been working in the IT field, I have just been enjoying the rare occasion of having three national bank holidays in a row, followed by the weekend, while the rest of my colleagues have continued working as usual. Thus you would expect that things may have been relatively busy, or, at least, just as good as it has been over the last few weeks, right? Well, things have been even better! Here is the weekly progress report screen shot:

WOW! 27 e-mails! Yes, that is right! A new low in the total amount of incoming e-mails for a single week! Sweet!  If I was ever looking for a nice way to celebrate the three months mark since I started with this new experiment I guess I couldn’t, perhaps, have a better one. I am not even sure whether I should continue calling it an experiment any longer, since it has already become a reality for me, at least. Three months, I guess, is a good time to stop calling it that way and start looking for something else. Or just simply venture into implying a new way of interacting, collaborating and sharing your knowledge with other knowledge workers. Either way, not too worried about looking out for definitions

For the rest not much more to share at this point in time, except for one particular gem I keep bumping into from various other folks who have been blogging about it and which I think would make an interesting connection with this particular blog post. For quite some time now, one of the questions that I keep coming up against all over the place is how do I keep up with everything that is going around in the social computing space? Most folks seem to think it is easier to manage your time through e-mail than through social software, when to me it is quite the opposite. It is way easier, and much more effective, to manage your time through social computing tools than through e-mail. And now there is something else I can refer folks to that could help answer the question quite nicely as well.

Check out Clay Shirky’s keynote session over at the recent Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco where you would be able to listen / read about some really fascinating stuff that Gina Trapani, over at Lifehacker, has put together quite nicely as a very thought-provoking summary in Where You Find the Time to Spend Online:

"We’re waking up from the "collective bender" of mindlessly watching sitcoms and instead, we’re choosing instead to spend our free time volunteering, interacting, and Web 2.0′ing online."

Just.Spot.On!!! And the same would apply to me, except that instead of T.V., which I rarely watch anyway, to be honest, it’s the time I save on processing / working through work e-mail that helps me free up enough time to collaborate and share my knowledge with other knowledge workers using social software tools. Because, after all, how much time do you spend on a daily basis working through your e-mail. One sitcom? Two? Three sitcoms perhaps?

Giving up on Work e-mail Podcast with Matt Moore et al

If a couple of days ago I created a blog post over here where I shared some further details on a recent podcasting episode I recorded with Jon Mell, from Trovus, over at Case Study Using Wiki and Social Software in the Enterprise – Conversation with Jon Mell, I thought I would follow that up with another podcast I was invited to chime in earlier on in the week with Matt Moore, from Engineers without Fears, where I shared some extended commentary on my experiment of giving up on e-mail, i.e. work related e-mail. And the interesting thing from this particular podcast I participated in was the fact that we did it with a couple more guests: Patrick Lambe, from Straights Knowledge & Green Chameleon, and Alex Manchester, from Melcrum – Connecting Communicators, two of the folks I have been following up on the Knowledge Management & Social Computing spaces for quite a while and whom I was really looking forward to exchanging some ideas on the topic!

Thus with that initial setup, off we went into what turned out to be, in my opinion and if I may say so, a fascinating discussion on the overall topic of stop using e-mail at work and use, perhaps, other much more productive and collaborative tools, within the social software space. So interesting that in the end what was supposed to be a single podcasting episode turned out to be three (Yes, three!) for a total amount of nearly 50 minutes!

Matt Moore himself has already blogged about each of the different episodes, so instead of just me detailing what you will find in each of them I am just going to keep things short and share over here the table of contents that Matt already put together. That way you can get busy right where the meat is and enjoy one of the best conversations I have had on this topic in a little while now. Here are the links with the contents then:

- Download Part 1 now (16:48, 4.0Mb)

01:00 – Luis describes his email detox moment in 2007.
03:10 – Luis challenges his email correspondents within IBM.
06:10 – How do you bring people round to the post-email world?
11:00 – Where is email appropriate?
13:00 – Instant messaging & social networking.

- Download Part 2 now (20:23, 4.8 Mb)

00:00 – Patrick raises the infrastructure question.
03:00 – Luis brings up wikis.
04:10 – Luis talks about discussing the detox with his team.
07:55 – The laziness issue.
09:00 – Do we love email?
10:00 – Alex mentions email overload.
11:00 – Generational issues.
13:00 – Patrick raises the politics question.
15:00 – Luis busts the whole thing wide open.

- Download the final part of the email detox podcast

00:00 – Alex agrees with Luis on email politics.
01:20 – Humans as political animals – in public or in private?
03:00 – Should we be selling tools or solutions?
06:00 – Applying social software to business problems.
08:00 – The email detox workout video.
10: 00 – Wrap up & next steps.

And that’s it! Hope you enjoy it, just as much as we did getting together and exchanging some ideas on how it is really possible to move away from work related e-mail and still be as productive as ever, if not more, making extensive use of other more collaborative tools, like social software tools. The perfect segway for my next blog post where I will be sharing the weekly progress report on what’s happened this week. Stay tuned!

Matt, Patrick and Alex, a real pleasure taking part on the podcasting episodes with you guys and thanks much for such refreshing conversation! Excellent stuff!

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, Communication, Jon Mell, Trovus, Matt Moore, Engineers without Fears, Patrick Lambe, Straights Knowledge, Green Chameleon, Alex Manchester, Melcrum, Connecting Communicators, Podcasting, Podcasts, Episodes