Giving up on Work e-mail – Status Report on Week 12

6 thoughts on “Giving up on Work e-mail – Status Report on Week 12”

  1. Hi Luis, fantastic to hear about your continued success with this effort! This is awesome!! Just curious, have you also been tracking the number of interactions you have outside your email? Your experience and reports are obviously compelling – but would be even more complete if there was some way to get insight on the sum total of communications/interactions because a key part of your exercise is moving email communications into other social software and tools, right? So ideally we’d expect to see interaction in those other tools increasing over time too?

    In other words, how can we answer a sceptic who suggests that what you’re seeing is just a simple (lucky) dropoff in email?

    (by the way, is it possible to include any stats from the week before you started week 1? or is that data lost?)

  2. Hi Kapil! Thanks a bunch for the feedback comments and for the information details! With regards to your question above on tracking the number of interactions outside IBM, I haven’t done that and haven’t thought about it just yet, I am afraid, more than anything else because I know it would be taking me quite a substantial amount of time to keep track of the numbers vs. just getting the job done. To give you an example: IM interactions is about 20 to 30 a day, blog posts, comments, Beehive interactions, BlueTwit / Twitter exchanges, Activities, Wiki & Quickr updates, etc. etc. I would be calculating around 100 interactions on a daily basis and seriously thinking that if I would track those down in the exact same numbers as I have been doing for e-mail I would probably be spending more time managing it all than getting the job done. So, as you can see, not much of an incentive for me in there. And besides that, I am interesting in keeping my e-mail count to zero, not in counting the total number of interactions. I am not worried about those, since they are taking place out in the open and public to everyone.

    Does that mean that since I started giving up on e-mail the number of interactions through other social software tools has gone up big time? Yes, it has, but the pace is quite all right, since it is allowing me to forget about e-mail and concentrate on the open conversations out there to get tasks / action items done.

    Hummm, not sure I would classify three months in a row as simple lucky dropoff in e-mail, when it has been over 12 months and as I result of what I am doing I am getting more work on presenting at events, writing articles, present at customer workshops, share knowledge and collaborate with other folks, etc. etc. I doubt it would be a lucky dropoff, specially since it’s been going on for so long on. I mean, don’t you think that three months consistently dropping off the total figures would be a bit more than a simple instance of a lower number of e-mails?

    Finally, when I was first getting started with this experiment on the first blog post I mentioned how back then I was getting an average of 30 to 45 e-mails day. I could go into the archives and provide some more concrete figures over the course of the last few months to provide that data, but again too much work for me to go there and grab it all, while I still have got a job to do, but the average of the 30 to 45 e-mails a day is pretty accurate from the last month or two before I got everything started.

    And last week, that total count of e-mails was down to 27 a week! Not bad. Not bad at all!

    Thanks again for the feedback!

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