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 46 (Living without Email – One Man’s Story. Are you Next?)

This is probably going to be my last blog post of this year 2008; a year that will mark a before and an after as far as my own adoption of social software is concerned, both inside and outside of the company I work for: IBM. A year that will be very difficult to forget for so many things! A year that nearly 12 months ago I had no idea it would develop into what it has finally turned out to be!

Far too many things happened to talk about them all over here in just a single entry and while everyone gets busy with their summary of this year and their predictions for 2009, I am, however, going to save you all of that hassle and just sum it all up with a single highlight on what 2008 has been and with what 2009 will be; at least, for me:

“A World Without Email!“

Yes, that’s right! A world without email! But I am not going to spoil things further. At least, not just yet. Most of you folks who have been following this blog already have got an idea of what I have been doing for most of this year on the topic of Thinking Outside the Inbox, while giving up e-mail at work, but what you may not know is that next year I will be back for more. But with a twist! A slight change of plans that I am hoping to share with everyone shortly on what I would be doing next …

But I am not going to reveal it just yet. You will have to wait for another couple of days. However, for today, and for this last blog post of the year, I thought I would share with you the last weekly progress report before end of the year (There will be another one for this current week we are going through next week, by the way!), which, on its own, will mark a huge massive milestone on what I have been doing for the last eleven and a half months! And you will see why by checking out the report itself:

Yes, indeed! As you will be able to see from the report, I have hit a new low of incoming e-mails in a single week. For week 46, i.e. last week, I have received a total number of 3 e-mails! You are reading it right! 3 e-mails!!!

I know you are going to say “Hang on, last week it was Christmas! It was supposed to be quiet anyway, right?” Well, that may well be the case, but think about the amount of e-mails you got yourself. Probably with a significant slow down of incoming e-mails, for sure. But 3? And what’s even better, and here is where the milestone kicks in, all of those 3 e-mails I have received was actually Christmas eCards!!! Which means, that last week, for the first time EVER!, I have managed to not receive ANY work related e-mails!!! Whooooaaaahhhh! (Massive!)

It has taken me 46 weeks, but I have finally made it! I have finally been able to prove the point that you can go by a week without using e-mail, but social software, and still get the job done! And all of that having a stronger sense of being productive with my immediate team(s) / communities and the rest of the company. So, I guess it is time for me to embark into my next challenge … (Yes, that one I will be talking about shortly and which will have a significant impact on this blog overall. But that would be something to share at a later time …)

For now though, I would want to wrap up this blog post pointing you folks to a (recent) lovely blog post that my good friend Steve Rubel (Who I have finally had the pleasure of meeting him up earlier in the year face to face, in Hamburg, at Next08) put together from a recent webcast we did together for Edelman’s Change & Employee Engagement explaining further more what it is like “Thinking Outside the Inbox“. You can read the article over here: Living without Email – One Man’s Story. Are you Next?

There is also a YouTube video (See embedded video below) from our Skypecast conversation that lasts a little bit over two minutes, but the interesting thing, I would think, would be the longer version of that conversation, which you can go ahead and download from the following URL: Edelman’s Change & Employee Engagement – Steve Rubel Interviews Luis Suarez on “Thinking Outside the Inbox“ (40 minutes) where you would be able to listen to some further insights on what I have been doing all along and also shared a few tips on how you, too, can tame the e-mail beast!

And that would be it for me for this year, folks. A very exciting and unforgettable year already preparing what’s about to start, if not, already, in just a few hours from now … Happy New Year everyone! Hope 2009 will bring you all plenty of health, prosperity & peace!

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, Social Networks, Networking, Conversations, Dialogue, Connections, Relationships, e-mail, email, Productivity, Communication, Re-purposing E-mail, No-Email, Challenge Your Inbox, Progress Reports, Thinking Outside the Inbox, Information Overload, A World Without Email, Steve Rubel, Edelman, Next08, Hamburg, Germany, Change, Employee Engagement, YouTube, Skype, Christmas, New Year, 2008, 2009, Health, Prosperity, Peace

Giving up on Work e-mail – Status Report on Weeks 15 to 20

If I would have to define the events that took place during the course of yesterday, Monday, when I was back at work at my home office, for quite some time after having finished a great deal of trips all over the place, I would have to define it all with three different keywords: hangover, funny & ironic! Yesterday I was supposed to get things going back again with my regular blogging; alas, it didn’t happen. And it didn’t happen because of the three descriptive keywords I just mentioned above.

Hangover, because I am still tasting the great victory of the Spanish football team at the unforgettable match against Germany in the finals of the European Championship. Yes, that tournament where we all were able to witness Football – Made in Spain. Like I have been mentioning all along. It is going to take us all weeks!, before we would be going back to normal again. So bear with us for a little while longer. You see? We didn’t get to experience this far too often, so now that we are, we want to get the most out of it!

Funny, because over the course of the weekend I finally managed to get through one of the major highlights of this year for myself and the kind of stuff I have been doing for the last five months. No, I am not talking about the recent Forbes.com article on "IBM’s Webbie World", which was pretty massive by itself, and will deserve, at a later time, a blog post on its own! I am talking about the article I got published by the New York Times (NYTimes from here onwards) detailing some more on the topic of my new reality of giving up on e-mail, i.e. corporate e-mail: I Freed Myself From E-Mail’s Grip.

Yes, that is the title on what has been a MASSIVE day for myself having to catch up with a whole bunch of conversations on this very same topic of giving up on corporate e-mail, in order to remain as productive as ever, if not more!, by making use of social software tools. And you may be wondering why yesterday was a funny day? Well, amongst various different ways, because you cannot imagine the huge amount of e-mails I got coming through both of my corporate & personal e-mail accounts on that very same topic of folks forwarding the article from NYTimes, or sending their congrats and kind wishes along, enquiring about how I am actually doing it, etc. etc.

I know! Too funny! How can that be that I am trying to pull the plug off and walk away from corporate e-mail, managed to get an article in the NYTimes on that very same topic and get back more e-mails than I ever wanted to anticipate! Arrrrggggghhhh! Yes, I can only think about just one thing: too funny!

And, finally, ironic, more than anything else because for a good number of the last few hours that particular article I published in the NYT was on the list of the Top 10 Most Popular e-mailed items! Ha! I know! Funny & ironic at the same time, indeed! Well, it doesn’t stop there, because if you care to take a few minutes to check out the reactions it has provoked already, it is going to keep me busy for a while as well trying to reply to some of the most fascinating discussions I have seen on the topic to date! And, no to worry, I am going to do just that! No doubt! It is not going to be the last word I’ll be saying on the topic…

I am not sure whether it will provoke a more profound change on how I have been dealing with things ever since I got started with this particular new reality of mine, but what I have realised all along is the huge amount of work to be done out there still to help enlighten folks as to how much more productive they can really be using social computing tools, than good old e-mail! Right, am I saying that e-mail is dead? No, I am NOT saying that! In fact, if you have been reading on this experiment from the very beginning you would remember how I have never mentioned that e-mail is dead!

I am just saying that it needs to be re-purposed and used for what it was meant to be in the first place: A communication tool for one on one conversations of a sensitive, private or confidential nature. The rest should be going out there, in the open, in the public space(s), transparent and with an opportunity for everyone to contribute! Notice that I am differentiating quite clearly between communication and collaboration, because they are not the same, no matter what people say about it!

Thus from here onwards I am going to use such article in NYTimes to continue further channeling some of the different experiences, thoughts, ideas, insights into various different blog posts, where I will be taking things into the next level, helping folks understand how I have managed to succeed at it, and, most important, how you can also get it going yourself for your own benefit, as well as your team’s & your communities’!

So what a better way of getting this started with a new level of interactions than sharing with you folks the various status reports from the last few weeks, now that my travelling spree is over and I would have plenty of more time to digest the actual outcome and how things have progressed further so far. I know that for a good number of weeks, up to Week 14, I have been providing a weekly report of how things have been moving along. And then things have stopped for a little while. Well, there was a reason why I didn’t come to the progress reports on how I am giving up on corporate e-mail. And that was the sheer madness of all of the trips I have been involved with lately.

But now that all of those are over, with the odd exception here and there, I think I am ready to go and share with you all the various different status reports, one after the other, so that you can see the progress, which I will try to evaluate with some final comments on the actual result and where I will be going from here. Thus without much further ado, here are the various different weekly progress reports on my giving up on e-mail new reality:

Phew! That was quite a lot of data to look into, Mr! Glad it is now over! As you would be able to see from the various different screen shots from the report, things were starting to change in my Inbox handling my incoming e-mails as I was starting to go into a dangerous trend of more and more e-mails week in, week out. Mainly due to the constant travel and the increasing lack of access to the Internet itself. As amazing as that sounds! I have been travelling to various places (Highlights on each of them coming up shortly as well!) where staying connected was a big challenge at best, including airports and big hotels! Not very helpful, to say the least …

But then again, last week things were back on track, once more, or, even better, when the total number of e-mails hit a new low in the five months I have been giving up on work related e-mail! Only 24!!! How amazing is that during the course of an entire week, with a short trip in between, I manage to just get 24 e-mails! Massive! Very.

And here I am, already going through the 21st week on this new reality of mine where I am no longer (ab)using corporate e-mail & where I am continuing to use it for the main purposes I mentioned earlier on. And as I am moving into the six months barrier, I am thinking that I am now ready to share with you folks which are the main tools, within the social computing space, that I get to use on a very regular basis, so that everyone out there bumping into this blog, and its many posts, would be able to find those tips helpful and resourceful to help them as well avoiding the clutter of collaborating through e-mail and bringing in a new wave of online interactions, much more out in the open, public, transparent and with the opportunity for everyone to contribute accordingly.

Thus stay tuned, because we just got started with this all! To me, it all begun with a single weekend where hangover, funny & ironic took a new meaning: that one of extending further and beyond the experience of what it feels like living without e-mail! … Can you imagine?

I surely did! I surely can! How about you? Want to join me?

Tags: IBM, See the Light, 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, Transparency, Progress Reports, Knowledge Sharing, KM, Knowledge Management, Collaboration 2.0, Communication, Spain, European Champions, Hangover, Football, Forbes, New York Times, NYTimes, Irony

Trip to Madrid to Present at Lotus General Business Sales Academy for Business Partners

And here we go on the road again! After a superb IBM Symposium 2008 event in Lucerne, Switzerland, from where, very shortly, I hope to be able to share with you folks, both the slide deck I used as well as a recording of both video and audio (Thus stay tuned for more details to become available whenever I get my hands on a copy of it!), I am now back in Spain, in Madrid, to be more precise, where tomorrow I will be spending the whole day long participating at the Lotus General Business Sales Academy for Business Partners.

This is an special event that till take place during the course of the entire day and where a bunch of IBM fellow colleagues will spend a fully packed agenda talking about everything IBM Lotus related world with Business Partners, going from what the market is like here in Spain for IBM Lotus, to good and thorough overviews of Lotus offerings like Lotus Foundations, Lotus Connections, Lotus Quickr, Unified Communications & Collaboration, Portals, Social Computing in general and a whole lot more with roundtable discussions and next steps!

Yes, indeed, like I said, a fully packed day starting at 9.30am till 6.00pm CET, non stop, except for a couple of breaks, along with lunch! Just brilliant! And you may be wondering whether I will be speaking at the event or not and would have to say the answer is "Yes!"

Continuing further with my travelling spree helping spread the message out about giving up on e-mail, i.e. corporate e-mail, I will be giving another presentation from the "See the Light – Thinking out of the Inbox" theme. Just before lunch and for about 30 minutes. I must say that I keep getting asked whether my original slide deck has changed, as I keep going from one event to the other one and I must say that it hasn’t. It is still the same one I talked about over here and which I shared over at Slideshare: Thinking out of the Inbox – More Collaboration through less e-Mail. Only thing that has changed is the size of it. I have reduced the number of slides to around 10 of them and during the course of this week I will be able to re-share the final deck I keep using for sessions under 30 minutes.

What keeps coming up as very different from each of the various sessions is my own pitch. I have been able to listen to a couple of the recordings done so far (Which I will be sharing over here as well shortly, too!) and time and time again the entire speech comes out different, very different in most cases, according to the target audience and the overall theme of each event, which keeps bringing in very interesting aspects of what I have been trying to do over the last few months already!

So much so that since I won’t be travelling much during the course of summer time, I have decided to get started putting together the next generation of the main presentation where I will be providing some more background of where I am coming from, how I got started with it, why I am doing it, and, perhaps the most important part so far, putting together a whole bunch of different tips that I have been using myself and which I would want to share with you folks so that you, too, can join me in this new reality of giving up corporate e-mail. Why? Well, more than anything else, because everyone out there that I keep bumping into seems to think that I got started with this because of e-mail overload or not doing very good myself with time management while handling e-mail.

Funny, eh? How can you have e-mail overload when you get 30 to 40 e-mails a day (Which is what I used to get before getting started with this new reality)? That’s not what I would call e-mail overload or time management issues, don’t you think so? To me, it is all about re-purposing e-mail and make use of it for what it was intended in the first place: a one-on-one private conversation discussing a sensitive matter. The rest should go out there in the open, public and ready for everyone to contribute into the overall effort of knowledge sharing and collaboration with other knowledge workers. Yes, I know, still plenty of work ahead of us, but we are getting there, slowly, but steadily!

Tags: IBM, IBM Symposium, Symposium, Lucerne, Switzerland, Events, Madrid, Spain, Lotus, Lotus Foundations, Lotus Connections, Connections, Lotus Quickr, Quickr, Unified Communications, UC2, Portals, Enterprise 2.0, Social Computing, Social Networking, Social Software, Social Networking, Social Media, Collaboration, Knowledge Sharing, KM, Knowledge Management, e-mail, No-email, Innovation, Communities, Learning, Social Networks, See the Light, Openness, Public, Conversations, Slideshare, E-mail Overload, Time Management, Repurposing e-mail