E L S U A ~ A KM Blog Thinking Outside The Inbox by Luis Suarez

A World Without Email – Year 2, Weeks 42 to 45 (50 Minutes a Week!)

While starting to look back into another amazing year with plenty of things happening all over the place, both on a personal and work related levels, I guess it’s time for me to start putting together a number of different blog posts on what this year has been like so far and what lies ahead for 2010. No, not to worry, *none* of these blog posts will be about the well-known, and already abundant, 2010 predictions series. Like every year, I’m planning to make it a bit more personal than just a business or industry focus. Like I said, for all of those there are hundreds of articles already out there which I am sure you may have been reading already…

So, over the next couple of weeks I am going to share a number of different reflections on what 2009 has meant for me and what it has enabled to prepare for the upcoming year. And perhaps the main major highlight that I have been thinking about throughout the last few weeks is how, once again, another year, I have managed to keep living "A World Without Email". Yes, that’s right! For the second year straight I’ve been able to carry on with my experiment of giving up on corporate email to the point where I never thought I may be able to pull it through altogether, but, here I am, coming closer to that date that will mark the third anniversary and still going strong!

It’s interesting to see how over the course of the last few months I seemed to have settled in with putting together blog posts with those "weekly" progress reports, but on a monthly basis. It looks like that’s the timeframe I keep coming back to in order to share what’s been happening. Interestingly enough, in a previous blog entry, I mentioned how I would be making use of my Posterous Web site to move those reports to. Yet, it hasn’t happened, as you may have noticed …

And judging for how attached I continue to be to this little project overall, I doubt it will ever happen. More than anything else, because I still want to keep things simple and point people to a single focal point of entry where they would be able to find all of the different progress reports without having to use multiple URLs, but just one. And besides that, also because I think the overall experiment still has got a place in this blog, at least, that’s how I feel about it and why, perhaps, I will continue to share those progress reports on a monthly basis over the next few months… Yes, I’m planning on keeping things going into the third consecutive year without using email at work! Yay!

I know that perhaps plenty of people out there bumping into these blog posts may not be rather excited about them, but, to me, it’s all about proving a point; and that’s been part of a reflection I have been pondering over the last few weeks as well: "A World Without Email" has always been associated with elsua. So why change that, right? That’s how most folks out there who have been following this blog for a while got to know someone called Luis Suarez, who nearly two years ago challenged the status quo of the corporate world saying out loud that enough was (Still is!) enough! No more email, please! Smarten up, think! and start making use of much more efficient and effective collaboration and knowledge sharing tools! Welcome to my Enterprise 2.0 world!

2009 has been quite a ride in this space, for sure! Having started the year feeling very much like I was alone fighting it all, showing and educating folks on how they themselves could move on further from email and into various other social software tools, surely has proved to be a rather exciting experience when at the end of the year I have been witnessing how several dozens of the people who I closely collaborate and share knowledge across with have managed to also cut down on their incoming email counts to the point where in most cases, and for a good bunch of them, I don’t even have their email addresses! Whoahhh!

Well, 2010 is going to continue with that trend. As more and more of my colleagues, and other fellow knowledge workers, get acquainted with a good number of social software tools somehow I sense how that third year without corporate email is going to be just as successful as the first or the second one. So if for this year I had set up a follow up challenge to receive around 20 emails, or less, a week, somehow I feel I’m ready to stretch it all out in 2010 and perhaps keep decreasing that number even more! Say between 15 to 20. Or even between 10 and 15, why not, right?

But how have I been doing over the last four weeks, you may be wondering, I am sure. Am I ready to keep things going with this experiment into the new year? Well, I think so. I hope so! If you take a look into the progress reports for weeks #42, #43, #44 and #45 you will see how over those few weeks things have been going really well (#20, #23, #12, #19, respectively, the number of incoming emails received) and since we are entering that time of the year where things are much slower than usual I can always be hopeful that I’ll be well into the new year right on target on that potential follow up challenge for that third year giving up on corporate email. W00t!

It’s interesting to see how when comparing the same periods of time from the first and second years the progression has been rather remarkable thinking that plenty of weeks I have been getting as much as half of the emails in the second year from the first one, so I keep being optimistic that things will continue going down, even though plenty of people keep saying that our corporate email usage will double in 2010. We shall see …

For now though, I’m just pretty excited that throughout these 45 weeks I have gone through without email at work I have been averaging around 24 emails per week. Yes, 24!! Which means that I have probably been spending around 50 minutes a week to process them all (Yes, 50 minutes a week!) and the rest of the time I have just been sharing knowledge and information (As well as collaborating across) in networked environments, i.e. social networks and communities, which is probably one of the best things I may have done in my 13th year working for my current employer: IBM. I may venture into saying as well I just regret one single thing from this whole experiment: not having started with it all back in 2000, when I was first exposed, and started using, social software tools… Oh well …

2010, here I come again! Are you ready?

Tags: 2009, Reviews, Yearly Review, 2010, Predictions, 2010 Predictions, Posterous, 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, A World Without Email, Challenges, Experiments

Máximo 1.400 Caracteres – Entrevista a Luis Suarez

A couple of weeks back, just before I took that long weekend holiday break to Tenerife, my good friend Marco Cimino (Marketing Sales manager at Sowre, one of IBM’s Business Partners in Spain) pinged me on Twitter to ask me whether I would be available to conduct an online interview by answering a few questions. Of course, you can imagine how I just couldn’t ignore, nor reject, such kind offer. So I accepted it.

After a couple of tweets and Direct Messages through Twitter itself, we established the best method to answers those online questions was Google Wave (No, not the usual way, I am afraid, no email in this house, remember? ). So he went ahead and created a Wave where he dumped all of the interview questions and I would head over there and try to answer each and every one of them. As simple as that. That’s what Wave is supposed to be good at, right?

I should probably talk a bit more in length about my overall user experience with Wave itself, specially since plenty of people keep asking me how it compares to email and whether it would replace email altogether as a communication and / or collaboration tool. However, I am not going to do it on this blog post. Yet, suffice to say that I do see plenty of great value in making use of it, specially within a very powerful scenario: task centric computing for a small reduced number of known collaborators (Basically, executing on the closure of a particular task where all participants know each other very well). But more on that perception at a later time…

For now I thought I would take this opportunity to point you directly to the online interview we conducted so you could have a look into it and perhaps chime in as well in some of the various topics we discussed. The interview itself is available in multiple places, and it’s written in Spanish, so it may also be a good opportunity for those folks who want to polish some of their Spanish skills.

To give you a taster of what the interview was all about, here you have got the questions that Marco sent across and for which I shared my ¢2 accordingly for each of them:

• "Desde hace algunos años te dedicas a impulsar la filosofía 2.0 en una multinacional como IBM; nos puedes explicar en qué consiste tu trabajo?
• IBM redactó en 2005 un documento de Guidelines (http://www.ibm.com/blogs/zz/en/guidelines.html) con respecto al uso de los Social Media. Hay 2 puntos que me llaman la atención: intenta añadir valor y sé tú mismo (habla con tu propia personalidad). Son declaraciones en el más puro estilo 2.0! crees que muchas empresas hoy en día están preparadas para salir al descubierto de esta forma?
• Nos podrías resumir las ventajas de la adopción de la filosofía 2.0 en la empresa?
• Muchas veces asociamos el mundo internet con el concepto de “gratuito”, “software libre”, etc. Como conviven, en el mayor fabricante de software comercial como IBM, estos 2 mundos, el software libre y el software comercial? En Internet todo es necesariamente gratuito?
• Sigo con interés y mucha curiosidad tu “experiencia” sin correo electrónico. Donde nace la necesidad de este experimento?
• Y después de más de 2 años cuáles son tus conclusiones al respecto? Es posible vivir son correo electrónico? Qué ganaríamos con ello?
• En un reciente post en tu blog nos hablas de un momento histórico en IBM. El momento en que Lotus Connections 2.5 se ha convertido en la plataforma estratégica de colaboración y gestión del conocimiento que será utilizada por los 500ks empleados de la compañía. De qué forma cambiarán los hábitos y la manera de relacionarse de las personas?
• Porqué es tan revolucionaria una solución como Lotus Connections? En que ámbitos las empresas deberían prestarle atención?
• Unas lecturas (libros, artículos, blogs) que sugieres para quien quiera iniciarse a la filosofía 2.0?
• Un lugar para visitar (real o virtual)?"

Lots of meat in there, I know! For those folks out there who may want to check out an English version of the interview you may want to have a look into this link (Google Translate did a pretty decent job at it, I must confess) to get a good glimpse of what we discussed… Hope you enjoy it just as much as we did going through it.

From here, I just want to take this opportunity to send across a very special thanks! to Marco for inviting me to take part of the interview and share some, hopefully, interesting insights on how the 2.0 philosophy is changing not just the way we do business, within the corporate environment, but also how we behave ourselves as knowledge workers, and humans!, in this brave new world of Social Computing versus the traditional Personal Computing we have been doing for a couple of decades already.

Thanks ever so much, Marco! It was a great pleasure and plenty of good fun going through it! And surely look forward to further interactions!

Tags: Interviews, Marco Cimino, Sowre, Business Partners, BPs, Google Wave, Wave, 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, A World Without Email, Empresa 2.0, Colaboración 2.0, Colaboración

The Man Who Should Have Used Lotus Connections – Innovate or Die

If yesterday I talked about the latest adventures of Molly exploring social software within the enterprise with IBM’s own Lotus Connections, today I thought I would go and check out what "The Man Who Should Have Used Lotus Connections" has been up to lately. After all, it has been a few weeks since the last time I talked about him and his discovery of the immense power behind participating actively in online communities in order to reach to fellow knowledge workers to share your own knowledge and collaborate on a common topic.

Yes, of course, I am talking about the wonderfully delightful series of video clips that my good friend, and fellow IBM colleague, Jean Francois Chenier, has been putting together over the last few months and whose latest episode (#5 at this point in time) is just as witty and hilariously funny as all the other ones, if not more! But this time around he actually touches base on a use case related to one of my favourite services within Lotus Connections: Activities. And I will explain why shortly …

First, go and check out "Innovate or Die". That’s the title of this last episode and although it lasts for a little bit longer than all the others (8′ 19”) it’s just as worth it going through it and learning plenty more how easy it can well be preparing, managing and hosting a conference event using Lotus Connections Activities versus other traditional communication and collaboration tools. Certainly, a lot less painful, I tell you and, if not, hit play, judge for yourself and start enjoying this last episode:

Just too funny, eh? I told you. I said you would enjoy it and I bet you did. And quite a bit! I did, too! It’s interesting to notice how from all of the various services that Lotus Connections has got Activities is probably the most unknown of them all. And, funny enough, it’s yet *the* most powerful one of them all! In this episode #5 Jean Francois takes the opportunity to show how different things could have been for organising and hosting a conference event when making use of Activities versus other options. And having used it myself a few times for such kind of event organising I can tell you how easy it is to keep track of multiple threads trying to nail down such complex set of activities without going crazy along the way.

But that’s not the only reason why I really do enjoy working with Activities, both inside and outside of the firewall. At a time when most people are talking about how effective the Getting Things Done method is within your email system, here I am myself having my own GDT method: Lotus Connections Activities. There are multiple kinds of definitions that plenty of folks have been using to define such service, but the one that I keep re-using myself constantly is how I view this component as my micro-project management system, allowing me to execute incredibly easy on every single to-do or action item that hits not only my Inbox, but also my own day to day productivity.

Indeed, Activities touches base on a key area that I have developed a keen interest on over the last few months as one of the major drivers of Enterprise 2.0 within the corporate world: Task Centric Computing. That is right, if you would want to focus on interacting socially in finishing up task after task, to-do after to-do, with hardly any effort and in an open, public and transparent manner, so everyone can benefit from those interactions, (Although you can also keep it private, if you wish) Activities is the way to go.

Why, you mabe asking? Well, mainly because of how simple they are to use; mainly because of how integrated this service is with a bunch of the tools that I use on a daily basis: Lotus Notes, one of my Web browsers (FireFox) and Instant Messaging with Sametime. So all of those action items that may come through my way through those tools, and whatever other ones, I can just convert them easily (With a single click, in most cases) into a new Activity (Or an existing one). Just like that!

But what’s also amazing is that if you happen to be a Lotus Notes 8 user you will have to agree with me that it is just such a treat being able to take those Activities offline and work disconnected. Whoahhh! Who would have thought about that, eh? One of the major issues that mobile knowledge workers have got against social software (Lack of offline support) is fully supported by Activities! Ha! I told you it’s one of my favourite social computing tools, right? That’s why! Now I can take my to-dos and action items in a protected and secured environment I control with me wherever I may well be… and WITHOUT using email! Good stuff!!

Better use cases than that one of GTD using Activities? Probably, yes, but you would have to agree with me just that one makes it all worth it giving it a try. And believe it or not, you, too, can take it for a spin, right as we speak and, best of all, free of charge: Welcome to Connections Activities on ibm.com!

Tags: Communities, Online Communities, Virtual Communities, Events, Conference Events, Events Management, Event Management, Lotus Connections, Activities, Connections Activities, Getting Things Done, GTD, To DOs, Action Items, Tasks, Task Centric Computing, Micro-Project Management, Micro Project Management, Lotus Notes, Notes 8, Lotus Notes 8, Sametime, Instant Messaging, FireFox, Ease of Use, Simplicity, ibm.com, Free, YouTube, Videos, Jean Francois Chenier, IBM Lotus Connections, Group Collaboration, Web 2.0, Enterprise 2.0, Social Software, Social Networking, Social Computing, Social Media, Collaboration, Learning, Knowledge Sharing, KM, Knowledge Management, Remote Collaboration, Innovation, IBM, Networking, Social Networks, Productivity, email, Re-purposing Email, No-Email, Challenge Your Inbox, Thinking Outside the Inbox, A World Without Email