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 28 (Putting e-mail in its place)

As I am about to wrap up quite an intensive and tough week at work, which is partially why I haven’t been very social in the last couple of days in most of the social software tools I usually hang out in, and almost ready to hit the weekend!, I thought I would let you folks with, yet again, another progress report on my new mantra of giving up e-mail at work as well as one of the best articles on re-purposing e-mail, both as a collaboration and knowledge sharing tool, that I have seen so far, ever since I got started with this new reality of mine seven months ago!

Yes, that’s right, I am already on the seventh month in a row, past week 28th!, without using e-mail as my main and primary method for sharing information, knowledge and collaborating with other knowledge workers. Yet, it is starting to feel like forever, like I have been doing this all along and that, finally, I am starting to see some really good results to the already interesting and exciting ones that have come through all along. But let’s just not talk about the week after week 28th, i.e. this week, because there is a little surprise coming up and it surely deserves its own space.

For now, let’s just focus on what happened last week and check out the report of incoming e-mails and see where we were back then. Here it is:

As you may have been able to see, last week was quite an interesting one from the perspective where the total number of e-mails increased quite substantially, specially during mid-week, which interestingly enough seems to be the couple of days where I keep getting the most e-mails. This time around I think there were a couple of reasons why such increase of e-mails took place. Mostly a couple of announcements on new changes taking place within the team I am part of. Folks obviously wanted to know more about those various changes and they wanted to know privately. So we kept the conversations private.

Remember, it is the only single scenario of e-mails that I still process through e-mail: a 1:1 conversation of a sensitive or confidential nature or that the other party would want to keep things private, like it has happened in this case. In that case I still process the e-mails through e-mail, which is why you are seeing that high increase during those couple of days. However, today, as I am about to wrap up week 29, I can certainly confirm that it is not a growing trend. But there is a little bit of a surprise, which I will be commenting on in an upcoming blog post.

For now, though, I would like to spend a couple of minutes pointing you to one of the most comprehensive, interesting, relevant, thought-provoking, enlightening and incredibly well written articles I have read in a long while on the topic of re-purposing e-mail successfully within the corporate firewall, to help increase your own productivity and that of the other fellow knowledge workers. When I read about it, I cannot stress enough over here, how much I felt identified with it. In its entirety! An amazing read that I would keep on referencing over and over and over again, because it surely deserves it. No doubt it! And if not judge for yourselves…

Check out the blog post that David Tebutt, (@tebbo in Twitter) put together a few days back under "Putting email in its place", which got also picked up by IT-Director.com. What an amazing read, to say the least!! David and I know each other for a while now. We have met in person and have been having lengthy, and really interesting, conversations on all what’s happening within the Social Computing & Enterprise 2.0 and beyond spaces, amongst other topics, and, ever since I started with this, he has been following what I have been doing with this new reality of moving away from corporate e-mail.

Well, in that particular article he has been able to articulate exactly how I feel about the whole subject of re-purposing e-mail and he has done it in such accurate and straight to the point terms that after reading the article over there I couldn’t think of anything else to add. Just perfect! Amazingly accurate! I am not going to reproduce the entire article over here. I am going to let you go and read it over at David’s blog. However, I am going to take the liberty of quoting a couple of excerpts, so that you have got the opportunity to glimpse what you would be able to find over there …

Thus without much further ado, here are a couple of quotes taken out of David’s article and which I am sure are going to make you smile a bit, as I am certain it would resonate quite a bit, with all of the stuff I have been writing about over here all along. So here it goes:

"[...] We have become so used to the convenience of creating email—whack in a few cc’s and a bcc just in case—we forget that it has a dark side. Unless you have very sophisticated filters, emails crave attention. They arrive, loaded with content which has to be scanned, at least.

Compare that with an instant message, a Twitter tweet or an RSS feed. They are all means of communicating. They’re fairly unobtrusive, but they can lead to great value. They can be scanned quickly and only those that require attention be acted on. In a group setting, a chat group—such as those that can be set up in Skype—is ideal. First you can see if there’s anyone around, then you might ask, "Hey, anyone know who’s organising the Office 2.0 conference?" Someone would answer and all the others know they don’t have to bother. Compare that with an email asking the same question. If there are nine in the group, that’s potentially eight responses—and each of those would probably be cc’ed to the other seven. [...]"

Or this other paragraph, which is my absolute favourite:

"Of course, group collaboration isn’t for everyone. It requires an openness, a transparency and a potential exposure that makes some exceedingly nervous. But group working, especially across disciplines and between insiders and outsiders (customer, suppliers) is becoming a vital part of business these days. The firewall isn’t going to disappear, but it’s certainly shimmering at the edges as insiders and outsiders exploit social media for mutual benefit" (Emphasis mine)

Many many thanks, David, for putting together, in such lovely and spot on words, all what I have been trying to do over the last few months and still going strong: challenge your e-mail system today!

Regardless the company / business you work for…

(There is no way back!)

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, Progress Reports, Knowledge Sharing, KM, Knowledge Management, Collaboration 2.0, Communication, Re-purposing E-mail, David Tebutt, Tebbo, IT-Director, Openness, Transparency, Exposure, Comfort Zone, Comfort, No-Email

See the Light – Thinking Outside the Inbox (The Video)

If you would remember, a couple of months ago I was invited to go to Germany and participate in a road show through various IBM sites scattered all over the country where a bunch of fellow colleagues, and good friends, and myself spend a number of hours providing an extensive overview of what Social Computing within the Enterprise was all about, then we touched based on some of the various Enterprise social software tools available out there and we rounded it all up with a session touching base on my new mantra of giving up on e-mail.

Yes, I am talking about the See the Light – Thinking Outside the Inbox road show I did with folks like Martti Garden, Matthias Zastrow, Swantje Schulze, Rene Werth and my good friend Ralph Demuth. Well, after some time I have now finally been able to put together something very much related to that road show that I thought most folks over here would find interesting and relevant, specially if you have been following my new reality of not using corporate e-mail over the last few months.

Back then I mentioned how we would eventually try to record one of the presentations I did on the topic of "Thinking Outside the Inbox" and then share it with everyone else. Well, we did! We managed to successfully record it in Düsseldorf and it was probably one of the best presentations I have delivered on the topic, at least, till then. It was recorded from my Nokia N95 (Boy, do I love that device or what? The quality of the recording audio and video is just outstanding!!) by Martti Garden and so far it has been one of the most extensive sessions I have done as well on the topic.

So, in it you will see me covering the background of why I got started with this, what it has been like, the kind of implications I have been exposed to on a daily basis, what social software tools I use on a regular basis to escape e-mail, and, most importantly, how you yourself can get things going as well to re-purpose the way you process work related e-mails. In short, I cover all of the stuff I have written about over here, but perhaps a bit more from the perspective on how it is all down to changing one’s habits as far as sharing knowledge and collaboration is concerned.

The video lasts for a little bit over 40 minutes, so I better stop right now and point you to it. It took me a while to find a video sharing site that would host such a large file, but in the end Vimeo seems to be doing the job quite nicely. So here it is:

See the Light – Thinking Outside the Inbox from Luis Suarez on Vimeo.

Hope you enjoy watching it, just as much as we did putting it together and making it available to everyone out there! And from here just a BIG and special THANKS!!! to Martti (Who patiently recorded the whole thing without a single glitch. I can imagine his arm & hand must have hurt for quite a bit after it was all done!), Matthias, Swanje, Rene and Ralph for all of the hard work they went through to put together such an amazing road show and for inviting me to take part of it as your special guest! You made me feel that way! Thanks much!!!

Tags: Germany, Social Computing, Social Networking, Social Software, Social Media, Web 2.0, Enterprise 2.0, Innovation, Knowledge Management, KM, Knowledge Sharing, Communities, Learning, Innovation, IBM, Software, Tech Sales, Sales, See The Light, SeeTheLight, Collaboration, Remote Collaboration, e-mail, Düsseldorf, Road Show, Tour of Germany, Re-purposing E-mail, Thinking Outside the Inbox, Martti Garden, Matthias Zastrow, Swantje Schulze, Rene Werth, Ralph Demuth, Nokia, N95, Video, Video Sharing, Vimeo, Presentations, Events

The Sweettt Podcast – Episode 5 – How to Make a Great Podcast

And we keep moving on! As you may have noticed already, over at Sweettt.com, Matt Simpson, co-host along with myself of The Sweettt Show, has just created a blog post a few hours ago, where he is sharing the next episode from our podcasting series on the topic of "How to Make a Great Podcast". But before moving on further on sharing a few thoughts about it, I thought I would go and clarify a couple of items that may need further explanations.

As you may have read in a previous blog post, we are not on episode #2 of the series, but on #5. It was, indeed, the second episode I co-hosted the podcast with Matt, but he has been working already on Sweettt.com for a little while and in reality we would be talking about that #5 I just mentioned. Thus we haven’t chewed on three consecutive instances of the podcast. I just caught up myself with the total amount of episodes available for tuning in! And yes, we are on #5!

Second item that I would want to touch base on is that if you have listened to that last episode shared you would be able to find out how we are still searching for the identity of the podcast and we may have reached it already! We are probably getting very close and we are going this time around with "The Sweettt Tertulia". We both like the term & the concept quite a bit and may stick with it for a little while more, as we explore some more options, but so far, it does seem to resemble that whole purpose of what we envisioned for the podcasting series from the very beginning: A Tertulia of a couple of friends with some other friends coming along and engaging in conversations on topics we all feel very passionate about!

Thus with all of that said, you can go ahead and check out "Sweettt.com – Episode 5 – How to Make a Great Podcast", from where you can listen to the podcast episode directly from there or, alternatively, you could go ahead and download the .mp3 audio directly from here. As usual, Matt put together a few show notes, which will give you an idea of what we talked over the course of roughly over 30 minutes. And at the same time, he included the lovely Wordle (From Jonathan Feinberg), which I am also going to include over here, so that you can get a bit more of a visual image of what we talked about:

Oh, and if you would want to have some more text, apart from all of what I have already mentioned over here, check out my show notes from the episode, where I have also tried to keep that informal flavour from previous chapters:

Show Notes #5:

- Still recovering from the SMACK found from episode #4. Boy, *that* was hilarious! Tummy still hurts!!
- Ahhh, those good old times while at high school. Remember them?
- Sweettt Tertulia is born! And with a special 2.0 flavour!
- Yeah, I like it … "The Sweettt Tertulia Show". Think we just nailed it!
- Moving on with the topic of Conversations (Yeah, we know, our favourite subject!)
- Finding the identity of a podcasting series is not as easy as you would think! Specially striking for the magic formula!
- What makes a good podcast? Yes, that’s what was in our mind and we think we are getting pretty close …
- Whooops! 113 downloads, not episodes, Mr! What were you thinking?!?!?
- Doug Cornelius, one of our favourite KM bloggers gets a mention, while discussing podcast consumption, while commuting.
- Time flies when you are having fun and you completely forget you are recording!
- 30 minutes of goodness! Is that the right length?
- 30 minutes may be a good measure, but why cut off the conversation when it is really engaging? Keep it rolling, baby!!
- Slicing it all may well be the final solution, while learning from others how they do it. Why re-invent the wheel, right?
- Matt Moore gets another mention for how he manages the podcasts he produces and distributes them in multiple parts of the same long episode. Nifty!
- Fun, fun, fun! The power of Show Notes! It isn’t your typical TOC, eh?
- Want to engage with us on the conversations? Get involved, drop a comment, whether it is text or audio! We’ll grab it from there and bring it on!
- At the end of the day… a podcast is still a podcast! Regardless what people may say!
- Oh la la, as a result of this episode http://sweettt.com has gone through a major re-design. SWEETTT!!!

Hope you enjoy this episode, just as much as we did recording it! And stay tuned, because there are plenty more to come!

Tags: The Sweettt Show, Sweettt, Matthew Simpson, Matt Simpson, The Sweettt Tertulia, Podcasting, Podcasts, Episodes, Series, New Media, IBM, Collaboration, Remote Collaboration, Social Software, Social Networking, Social Media, Social Computing, Web 2.0, Enterprise 2.0, Conversations, Knowledge Sharing, KM, Knowledge Management, Collaboration 2.0, Communication, Communities, Learning, Innovation, Personal Knowledge Sharing, PKM, Identity, Tertulia, Wordle, Jonathan Feinberg, Doug Cornelius, Matt Moore, Innotecture, Engineers without Fears