A World Without Email – Year 3, Weeks 9 to 10 (EMail’s Reign Is Over, Social Networking Is The New King)
Posted on Apr 20, 2010 | Categories: Collaboration, Communities, Enterprise2.0, IBM, Innovation, Knowledge Management, Knowledge Tools, Personal KM, Productivity Tools, Social Enterprise | 7 Comments
I wasn’t planning on putting together another blog post so soon on the (no longer) weekly progress reports on my initiative of living "A World Without Email", but then again late last week, and over the course of the weekend, I saw on my Twitter stream a whole bunch of retweets on what I thought was (Still is!) a rather interesting reading: "CHARTS OF THE WEEK: Email’s Reign Is Over, Social Networking Is The New King". But then it got better when my good friend David Tebbutt followed it up with this rather insightful tweet:
"I said this headline – Email’s reign is over http://bit.ly/cfHLbD - vindicated @elsua . On the graph, email must head south before it does"
So I thought I would come back to the topic and share with you folks what has happened in the last couple of weeks as well as a new report I have put together which I am sure you would find rather interesting. To answer David’s insightful (And rather spot on!) comments with just a single thought I would probably state the following: Yes, email *is* heading south pretty consistently, and badly, over the last three years! At least, for me!
Now, here is the longer story. To get things going let me just point to Year 3, Week #9, and then check out Week #10, embedded below:
As you would be able to see, the last couple of weeks I have received well under 20 work emails per week! Yes, I know! Way below 20!! Which I think is a terrific piece of news, since in most cases I would reach such low numbers on the second half of the year; and lo and behold, here we are, on the second quarter of the year and already way below that 20 email per week mark!! But it gets better …
If you check further the various different weeks, you may have noticed, how, except for two of them (With 24 and 25 emails per week, respectively!) the remaining weeks haven’t reached over 20 emails per week at all. A couple of them are actually below 15 emails a week! Whoahhh! That’s just brilliant! And incredibly exciting to see how year in, year out, my work related emails become less and less of a worry to me.
Ok, to answer David’s comment about how email needs to start heading south before we can pronounce it dead (And most of you folks know it’s not a wording I enjoy much, since I still see benefits in making use of email for 1:1 private, confidential interactions and calendaring & scheduling of events), but still playing long with the wording from that link, I thought I would share with you a new chart I have put together where you can see the first 10 weeks for each of the three years where I have given up on corporate email, and eventually moved over to social networking tools.
If there would be a rather revealing report I bet it would be this one. Without any doubt! And here is why:
Take a look at the number of emails received per week, per year, for those first 10 weeks I shared above. You will be able to see how there is a rather substantial reduction in the amount of incoming emails, going from 60 as the highest number of emails for those three years in a single week to just 7 on the third year, as the lowest amount of emails received in a single week so far. But let’s see another interesting set of statistics:
- Year 2008: 418 emails received for the first 10 weeks
- Year 2009: 255 emails received for the first 10 weeks
- Year 2010: 170 emails received for the first 10 weeks
I’m not sure what you would think, but going from 418 emails per week (for the first 10 weeks!) on the first year, down to 170 for that same period of time on the third year is rather remarkable and, in my opinion, a clear sign, that, at least, for me, email *is* heading south on that link to that chart, and that can only mean a good thing: that, finally, I’m now capable of worrying about other things work related and email is not one of them. Isn’t that a wonderful feeling?
The best part though is yet to come … It’d be that one when I’m no longer alone on this one. And, by the looks of it, I suspect it’s not going to take much time anymore. It’s happening more and more often by the day with other knowledge workers out there and I guess very very soon I may have a good bunch of success stories to share with you folks on how other people have managed to give up successfully on their corporate email.
Are you ready to make the big jump? If not, what is it that you are waiting for? Aren’t you making already good use of social networking tools as your core default business tools?
Maybe you should…
Tags: David Tebbutt, Tebbo, 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
