You may remember my last blog post on the topic of the weekly progress reports of living “A World Without Email“, where I mentioned how I was in the process of putting together an article where I would be able to share with folks how they could kill over 85% of the incoming emails they get on a daily basis. Well, it is proving to be a little bit of a challenge to eventually share it out there, because there is just so much that I want to include in that current draft (#3 at the moment) that I doubt it would fit in within a single entry. So I keep re-editing it, hoping it would see the light one of these days… Hang in there though, I am sure it will eventually be available for everyone to read very soon!
So, what happened last week then, you may be wondering, with regards to my weekly progress report on giving up email at work, right? Well, it looks like things are becoming steadier by the week and may have settled down around the barrier of the 25 emails received per week thus far. From my follow up challenge for this year of 20 or less a week. Getting there, I suppose; slowly, but steadily. Here is the snapshot from Week 10:
As you would be able to see, it looks like there wasn’t a single day last week where there was a substantial increase, for whatever the reason, like it happened in previous weeks, which I guess is a good sign of things going back to normal. Like I mentioned, my new mission is to eventually get under 20 emails a week and so far seeing how close I am from that target already is, for sure, some really good news!
Talking about good news … Over the last few hours I have been getting lots of offline interactions from various folks who took the time to listen to Episode 11 from The Sweettt Podcast and make some interesting comments, specially around the subject of my conversation with Matt Simpson on re-purposing the way I interact with email and how for the first time a couple of folks hinted what I have been trying to achieve all along: that is, how I am not very much in favour of killing email per se altogether, but more on fragmenting the number of interactions, or, even better, diversifying the conversations I have coming through my Inbox and make a much more appropriate use of other collaborative, knowledge sharing and social software tools that could fit in a better purpose than an email.
Yes, indeed! That’s all I am trying to do with this living “A World Without Email“. I have never said that email is dead nor that it will disappear any time soon. In fact, I still see plenty of benefits for email, specifically for 1:1 interactions. However, email is perhaps not the best of knowledge sharing and collaborative tools. Quite the opposite!
And that’s just what that upcoming article I mentioned above will be about. Not how to kill email, nor how to make it disappear from your daily routine, but certainly how to reduce over the 85% to 90% of noise that is currently coming through it. What I am trying to show everyone is how we need to think before we send that next email, because there is a great chance there may be a better tool to share that information / knowledge than through an email. In most cases there usually is!
So there you have it. The prelude of the upcoming article I hope to be sharing with you all pretty soon that will probably help you change or adapt some of your daily habits in how to get in touch and connect with your peers to share what you know. And in most cases avoiding the tool we all know doesn’t always fit the right purpose all the time. Email.
Tags: Enterprise 2.0, Social Software, Social Networking, Social Computing, Social Media, Collaboration, Communities, Learning, Knowledge Sharing, KM, Knowledge Management, Remote Collaboration, Innovation, IBM, Networking, Social Networks, Conversations, Dialogue, Communication, Connections, Relationships, email, Productivity, Re-purposing Email, No-Email, Challenge Your Inbox, Progress Reports, Thinking Outside the Inbox, Information Overload, The Sweettt Podcast, Sweettt, Matthew Simpson, Matt Simpson, The Sweettt Tertulia, Modern Salon, Tertulia 2.0, Podcasting, Podcasts, Episodes, Think!, Think, Fragmentation, Diversifying, Re-purposing Email
Luis,
i have been following your study/research (live through) on living without email. I am sorry to say, as I progress with your findings, I feel the scope is narrowing to not using email and not considering the objective of not using email. I mean the objective of communication still holds. I miss these details on your blogs.