As you would remember, today I am travelling to Hamburg, Germany, to spend the rest of the week in there, waiting for the 15th of May where I will be presenting at the Next 08 conference early in the afternoon and on the topic of "Thinking out of the Inbox - More Collaboration through less e-mail" (I am hoping to be able to share the slide deck shortly, by the way, in Slideshare, thus stay tuned!). And here I am on the plane, flying high up in the sky, getting ready to share with you my weekly progress report on my giving up on e-mail, i.e. work related e-mail. But before I go ahead with it allow me to spend a couple of minutes thinking out loud about something that has been in my mind for the last few days.

I twittered about it yesterday and got into a fascinating discussion, probably too short due to lack of time while I was getting everything ready for this trip, with a bunch of others who were sharing similar experiences. Just recently I keep getting this odd feeling of having neglected, and still neglecting somehow, this particular blog since my regular blogging activities are not as regular as I thought they would be nowadays. Yes, way at the beginning of having started this blog, I decided that I was going to keep things going for a long while trying to post daily sharing my thoughts on interesting conversations or initiatives I was getting involved with around the areas of Knowledge Management, Communities, Collaboration, Social Computing, amongst several others.

That motivation to keep posting and sharing those thoughts is still as intact as it was many years ago, and will continue to be so for many moons to come, however the lack of physical time to do it, due to all of this travelling, conference events, their corresponding presentations (And having to put them together, of course!), customer workshops / engagements, etc. etc. is starting to slow me down with my overall blogging activities. At least, that is the impression I am getting at the moment. And I don’t seem to be the only one…

I seem to recall how Tara Hunt, a.k.a. missrogue, mentioned at some point in time in her Twitter stream, how she was feeling along the same lines saying something like people were having all of the fun, while she was on a constant massive burst of conference events and meetings, and whatever other engagements, with customers talking about Social Computing that kept her busy to no end and without the opportunity to jam where all the fun was happening. Well, that’s how I feel at the moment myself after all of this travelling and everything. No, I am not getting tired of it, everyone who knows me well enough would tell you how fond I am of travelling, but from that to say almost every week you are going to be on the road it is quite a bit, I am sure! Yes, I am missing all of the good fun! Got lots of stuff to talk about and share, yet, very little time to do it properly, at least, in a way that I would feel comfortable with it.

So one of the suggestions from yesterday’s conversations in Twitter (Coming from Steve Matthews) was to actually continue blogging at that very same pace, but perhaps keeping things shorter, meaning that there would be less time spent in blogging and perhaps more focused towards just that particular idea shared thus far, specially while I am away. Yes, I am sure you all know how bad I am at keeping things short, this blog post is another good example, but I think Steve’s idea surely is worth while pursuing, why not? I think it would probably be better to actually create a shorter blog post with an idea or two than none at all, right? Thus I am going to give it a try and see if I can come back to all the fun!

But for now, and like I was saying at the beginning of the entry, and as a way of getting back into the fun, here you have got the details from the weekly progress report from my giving up on e-mail new reality. Already on week 13! Yesterday I had problems trying to upload the screen shot of the report into Flickr, but I am hoping that today things would work out all right. Here it is:

As you would be able to see the number of e-mails has gone up a little bit, but still within the target of between 30 to 40 e-mails a week. In this case 35 e-mails!, which I think is very very doable and still within what I was aiming for. However, one of the things that I am noticing is how over the last couple of weeks and, after seeing how the experiment has consolidated into a total success, I keep getting a number of e-mails with which I am not feeling very comfortable, because I don’t seem to be having a way to get rid of them for good. At least, just yet.

Yes, indeed, I am talking about e-mails that are related to scheduling, setting up and participating in conference events, customer meetings / workshops, specially when it is to show my own experiences on this new reality itself. I am thinking that if I would be able to find a way to reduce those I would be getting my number of incoming e-mails down to 15 to 20 a week. If not less! Yes! As massive as that!!!

So that got me started into thinking about a way of getting rid of those e-mails and divert them elsewhere. And it wasn’t easy, to be honest. John Tropea (One of my favourite bloggers in the Knowledge Management, Collaboration, Communities, Social Computing & Librarian 2.0 spaces and surely one of those bloggers to add to your blogroll in case you haven’t done so already!) put together, not long ago, a pretty impressive blog post under "Examples of re-purposing e-mail" and he already provides some hints as to what I could be doing, but I will comment more on that blog post as time goes by. Too good to just mention it over here and definitely one that would be worth while exploring further into building a wiki space, putting together all of those different examples as a way of showing everyone else how they can start doing it in small, but steady steps.

John seems to be inclined to make use of Lotus Connections‘ Activities for the calendaring and scheduling coming through e-mails and I must confess that I have thought about it, too, myself, as well as a couple of other options. I have been thinking as well that a forum, with a discussion group (i.e. Newsgroup) may be another option, but kind of walked away from that idea since the IBM Forums I am exposed to cannot protect entries that may be of a sensitive nature. Then I thought that a wiki, with protected access where needed / required, may be another option to go by, but perhaps too difficult for other folks to engage with.

However, Connections’ Activities seems like it is an ideal way out for me. More than anything else because they can host both public and private events discussions. Also the fact that they are fully integrated into Lotus Notes 8 and Sametime 8 allowing everyone I may be working with to set up one of them and then send it over across to me, so that I can chime in and share a thought or two on the topic. And right there we could consolidate all e-mails exchanged thus far, IM chats involved as well as well as attaching the corresponding files as the final output of the event, and if there are any feedback forms collected after the event they could also be shared over there.

Thus here we go. I think that I am going to settle down for Connections’ Activities and start making use of them to walk away from e-mail one step further, as a way to arrange all of these different events and see if I got it right as to how further more I could reduce my weekly incoming e-mail count.

Oh, did I mention how you could collaboratively work together with other folks on the same activity? Let’s see how it goes from here… Stay tuned for further updates and see what happens in upcoming weeks! In future progress reports I am sure I will have an opportunity to share with you my experiences on them.

Now, off we go, on to shorter blog posts while I am away travelling and see if I can keep up with a nice pace of those regular blogging activities that were once part of this specific blog. Although perhaps Darren Rowse may be right altogether. I may not need to blog on a daily basis any longer… What do you think?

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, Communication, Conference Events, Hamburg, Germany, Next08, Next 08, Slideshare, Twitter, Blogging 101, Blogging Tips, Tara Hunt, missrogue, Steve Matthews, Flickr, John Tropea, Re-purposing e-mail, Lotus Connections, Connections, Activities, Forums, Newsgroups, Wikis, Calendar Events, Calendar, Lotus Notes, Notes, Notes 8, Lotus Notes 8, Sametime, Lotus Sametime, Sametime 8, Lotus Sametime 8, Real-time Collaboration, Darren Rowse, Travelling, Blog Frequency

Over the last three months a few folks have been contacting me, through various different methods, including e-mail, of course, to ask whether I am getting into any kind of trouble with my management line for the blunt move I have made on moving away from work related e-mail and use social computing tools instead for the last few weeks. Trouble? Well, initially I can imagine that for some folks out there it may well have been the perception that I would be getting some kind of negative feedback with such bold move, but then again things haven’t been that way. At all. On the contrary.

Because of my role as a social computing evangelist at IBM, some other folks have always wondered whether this new reality I am experiencing of giving up on e-mail, i.e. work related e-mail, was something that was inspired by someone above me in the management line and therefore having the necessary support for it for the rest of us to execute it further. However, that hasn’t been the case. This whole thing was basically started by myself thinking that I needed to change the way I was working because it was not productive enough. At least, it wasn’t giving me that feeling and over three months now down the road I knew I was into something completely different that would change the way I work now and will always do.

Yes, initially there were a bunch of skeptics who came over to me mentioning how I would rather be getting fired for it, or just give up on it altogether since there is no way that you can carry out your work without e-mail. And to them all along I have been telling them that if there is a way to make it happen, it will be happening. One of the groups of people that  has been my inspiration all along has been the younger generation of the workforce who is coming up really strong with plenty of energy and very keen on collaborating making use of everything, but e-mail. I am sure that those folks who may have been exposed to such generation already know exactly what I am talking about, so if they have been able to do it, why can’t we do it ourselves as well, right? … Yes, that is what I thought.

However, one of the commonest comments that I have been getting from various different people from almost the very beginning is more along the lines of how lucky I am of working for the company I work for that allows me to have a good exposure to a respectable number of knowledge sharing, collaborative and social software tools that perhaps other folks may not have been exposed to. And in the end this is certainly making it possible for me to make it work.

Too funny, eh? When most people out there think that IBM is actually a boring, old and typewriter related company (Thanks much, Gia, for passing that interesting link along!) I cannot but smile about the whole thing, because that may have been the case of our father’s IBM, but it certainly is not the IBM of the 21st century that I started working for some years ago. Quite the opposite! And, as an example, take a look into the superb blog post that one fellow IBMer, and very good friend, Matt Simpson, put together under this particular title: "Walk like a Minister".

In that particular blog post you would be able to see how he is describing the IBM of the 21st century where innovation plays a key role and where knowledge workers are being provided with a whole bunch of different tools to keep that same innovation as rampant as ever. And if not, check out these gems that Matt has put together and which clearly define, pretty nicely, some of the background of where I am coming from as far as my new mantra of giving up on e-mail is concerned:

"The world’s 14-year leader in number of patents didn’t get that way by NOT engaging in everything new. There are lots of things behind the firewall with which early adopters are having a blast: blogs, wikis, podcasts, broadcasts, micro-blogging, tagging, social photo sharing, social video sharing, social file sharing, IM for over a decade now, online communities, 3D Internet / virtual reality, online friends & connections, rating & reputation systems… there are over 100 innovations available within our early adoption program. The list goes on. We don’t gate our innovations. We promote them!" (Emphasis mine)

Or this other one:

"And guess what… We need these tools. The workforce has changed. The standard for the online social interaction experience is set across the Internet. The corporation that doesn’t embrace this functionality will be the corporation that doesn’t stand the test of time. In case you haven’t noticed, IBM is Built to Last".

After reading those quotes from Matt, I guess there is very very little I can add. Perhaps only that it is thanks to that boring and old company that I have been able to finally come to terms with the fact that being productive and walking from e-mail is something that is not only possible, but a reality. My reality. And everything that a company from the 21st century would want to keep trying and promoting, if they would want to keep pushing innovation into a higher level. And I am really glad to be part of one that allows me to just do that: … Innovate with a capital I!

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, Brand Tags, Gia Lyons, Matt Simpson, Communities, Learning

If someone would have told me, some time last year, that things were going to be this busy at this time of the year, I would have told them they would be crazy! Alas, it is me the one who is going crazy! Wonderfully crazy, if I may say so! With no time to continue finalising the drafts I have been putting together for the IBM Web 2.0 and Beyond Summit, with which I am going to take another approach, as a new experiment, and see how things would go from there (See if I can finally push them through), here I am putting together another blog post to share with you folks the details of another trip I will be embarking on very shortly.

Yes, indeed, I will be on the road again! This time around to Hamburg, Germany, and as early as next week to attend an external conference whose line-up put together so far is rather fascinating and impressive: Next Conference, a.k.a. Next08 - Realtime. At the same time that I will be attending the event, I have been invited to participate as one of the speakers (Have got a keynote session at 2.45 p.m. CET on May 15th) and will have the great honour of sharing the stage with one of the folks I have been following for quite some time now and for whom I have got plenty of admiration accumulated over the course of the years. Yes, I am talking about JP Rangaswami, author from Confused of Calcutta and today Managing Director of BT Design for BT Group, according to the Wikipedia.

If you care for a moment to check out the agenda you would be able to see the good amount of great speakers that will be there, too. Some of them folks I have been following, and violently agreeing with all along, for quite some time as well, but who I have never met face to face and next week may be the perfect chance to do so. Examples like Stowe Boyd, yes, that edgling, Steve Rubel (The one and only!), Stefan Kellner (From Plazes), Gunter Dueck (Fellow IBM colleague who has done some tremendous piece of work on Knowledge Management and data warehouses), Leisa Reichelt (Author of the super fine Disambiguity) and the list goes on and on and on.

Thus with that specific agenda and impressive list of amazing speakers, you can imagine that the excitement is starting to grow inside of me quite a bit. More than anything else, because it is just right around the corner and can’t wait to get there and continue to learn from all of these thought leaders who have been pioneering in the Social Computing and Enterprise 2.0 spaces for quite a bit already!

In case you are wondering what I would be talking about at the event, I am sure that, if you have been following this blog for a while, you would already have a sense of what it will be about. Yes, indeed, about my experiment on giving up on e-mail, work related e-mail, that is. And with the well known title (Put together already by Craig Cmehil and Ed Stephens, respectively) of "Thinking out of the Inbox - More Collaboration through less e-mail". I have already finished the slide deck and this time around it is very much public, for open consumption, outside of the firewall, so once I get the heads up from the conference organisers I will be sharing the deck over here, after I upload it into Slideshare.

Yes, almost ready, indeed! You may be wondering when I am planning on getting there, right? Well, I will be arriving on the 13th, at around mid-day and will be leaving Hamburg on the 17th of May late in the evening. So if you fancy getting together for a drink or two, or to catch up with a lovely conversation while I am there, do not hesitate to contact me and we will arrange something, I am sure. For now, signing off and checking out some further details from the overall conference itself, which I am sure is going to be one of those special events where I might get to finally figure out whether I am a centroid or an edgling. Or something in between, who knows heh

Tags: Conference Events, Next Conference, Next08, Realtime, IBM, Hamburg, Germany, JP Rangaswami, Confused of Calcutta, BT Group, Stowe Boyd, Edgling, Centroid, Steve Rubel, Stefan Kellner, Plazes, Gunter Dueck, Lisa Reichelt, Disambiguity, Craig Cmehil, Ed Stephens, Slideshare, Collaboration, Knowledge Management, KM, Knowledge Sharing, Communities, Learning, Innovation, Web 2.0, Enterprise 2.0, Marketing 2.0, Mobile 2.0, Media 2.0, e-mail, Social Computing, Social Software, Social Networking, Social Media

I was just on the verge of posting over here in this blog the first of three posts that I have put together sharing some of the various highlights from the IBM Web 2.0 and Beyond summit, along with one other blog post detailing my experience while I was in NYC for a couple of days, but then I realised that each of them are rather lenghthy entries and since yesterday I created a couple of blog posts over here already I thought I would go easy with some light blogging today in preparation for what’s ahead in the next couple of days

So, with all of that said, I am just going to put together a few lines in here to let folks know that, once again, I will be on the road travelling to meet up with a couple of customers. This time around, as you may have been able to check through my Dopplr account already, next week, on the 19th of May, and till the 22nd, travelling to Barcelona and with a fully packed agenda for the 20th and 21st meeting various clients to discuss Social Computing within the Enterprise, and the kind of impact Social Software is having within the corporate world.

I will be coming back on the 22nd and since I already got the flight tickets and everything I just need to worry about the hotel, although I have been provided with some excellent recommendations already. Probably staying in the city center to be able to move easily and quickly, too! I doubt I would be getting much free time during the course of the 20th and 21st, specially during the working hours, but other than that it looks as if I am going to be pretty free for the rest of the time.

Thus fancy meeting up? How about some lovely tapas, a couple of beers here and there and all of that on the beach?!?! That’s the plan I have already set up with Tom Raftery, who earlier on today contacted me through Twitter to let me know that he got notified by Dopplr that we would be both going to the same city at the same time! How cool is that? (Dopplr ROCKS!!!) He is going to be there for the Startup 2.0 event, while I will be meeting up with customers, but it sounds like a really cool plan to me! Not only will I be able to finally meet up with him in real life, but I would be able to catch up with the event he will be attending with his highlights while I treat him for a drink or two heh

I know as well that Ferdy Rodenas lives in Barcelona, so that’s probably going to make it easy as well to meet up with someone I have been looking forward meeting up for a little while now, after all of our online interactions in various different places, just like Tom.

Thus there you go. We got a plan. Tapas, beers, a bunch of good friends and all of that on the beach, because I am sure the weather is going to be rather nice. Want to meet up, if you are around? Do let us know. Through a comment over here, or on Tom’s blog or Ferdy’s or hook up with us on Twitter. Probably the easiest way. Hope to see you there!

(Not sure just yet whether I would be able to blog about the outcome of the meetings with these customers, you would need to wait for a few more days, but if I can, I surely will, because so far the the scenarios are just perfect on one of the core arguments that I use for my pitch on Social Software in the Enterprise. Stay tuned for more to come…)

Tags: IBM, Travelling, Trip, Barcelona, Customer Meetings, Dopplr, Social Computing, Social Networking, Social Software, Social Media, Collaboration, Communities, Enterprise 2.0, Web 2.0, Innovation, Knowledge Sharing, KM, Knowledge Management, Tom Raftery, Twitter, Startup 2.0, Events, Ferdy, Ferdy Rodenas, Tapas, Beers, Beach, Life, Work, Balance

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?

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