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

Tenerife

Goodness! Where does time go?!?! It looks like it was only yesterday when I created the last blog post over here and when checking things out it turns out that it is eventually nearly two weeks since the last one! Whoahhh! Talking about being busy, eh? Well, not really. Errr, I mean, I have been rather busy, indeed, as we are coming closer to finish off another amazing year, but I have also been busy in doing something else that happens usually at this time of the year for me and which I can’t skip just like that: my holidays!

Yay! Indeed, it looks like the yo-yo effect that you folks are seeing with my recent blog posts over here has got to do with the fact that holidays have taken their toll and have managed to keep me disconnected and away from everything online for a little while. Then when coming back to work things are rather hectic, as usual, trying to catch up and, before I know it, it is nearly two weeks that I have been away from this blog. Whoah! (Again!)

Anyway, I am now back again into the full swing of everything online and, as such, regular blogging activities will resume in this blog from here onwards. Just my usual self. In fact, next article is going to have an interesting observation I have been pondering about on what, to me, seems to be *the* real barrier towards full adoption of social software within the enterprise. And, in this cases, just before you jump into the wrong conclusions out there, it hasn’t got anything to with work, enterprise nor business. (Interesting, eh? Well, coming up shortly!).

To get things going though, and to resume my regular blogging activities, I thought I would share with you folks a few words of where I have been over the last few days (Although I have been back at work for a couple of days already!). As you may have noticed, for a good number of months, I have developed that habit of sharing a picture every time that I put together a blog post over here. Most folks have realised that those pictures are actually rather special to me.

Yes, they are all pictures I have taken myself from the island I have been enjoying tremendously for the last five and a half years: Gran Canaria. Each of them has got its own story; some of them are even related to the article I publish next to them; some of them just bring back so many good memories from when they were taken; most of them are dear to my heart making me realise how lucky I am of living where I live.

Either way, beginning of December, I decided to finally put an end to something that I almost felt embarrassed about: the fact I have been in Gran Canaria for nearly six years and I didn’t had the decency :-O to go and check out some of the other equally stunning Canary Islands. Yes, I know! Shameful! So I thought it was a good time to put an end to that and a couple of weekends ago I decided to spend a long one in the other one island that has been attracting me for a while now, right from the start almost: Tenerife.

That’s right! I decided to jump into the ferry and spend a whole weekend of disconnectedness and just pure unwinding! And wildly successful, in my opinion! Why? Well, you may want to pop over into my Flickr account to get a taste of it, but mainly because of breath-taking, mind-blowing and incredibly humbling experiences as this one:

Or this other one:

Or how about this other one?:

Not bad, eh? Well, I could tell you a whole bunch more of the stuff I went through, constantly being wowed with full unbelievable emotions and experiences, but I think I’ll just leave you with those pictures for now letting you know I will be adding a whole bunch more over the next few hours into a new set I created a couple of days back … As stunning and incredibly amazing as this one:

Like I said, regular blogging activities will resume from here onwards, as usual, but that weekend I spent in Tenerife surely made me wish I would have taken on photography when I was a lot younger, because these pictures don’t really make justice to some of the stunning sceneries and magnificent landscapes I got to witness over those four days of intense brilliance!

Thank you, Tenerife! I will be back again! One day. I know. For sure!

Tags: Holidays, Weekend Breaks, Breaks, Unwinding, Disconnectedness, Disconnected, Work, Life, Balance, Work Life Integration, WLB, Work Life Balance, Spain, Canary Islands, Gran Canaria, Tenerife, Mount Teide, Teide, La Rosa, The Rose, Flickr, Pictures, Photography, Humbling Experiences, Landscapes, Brilliance

A World Without Email – Year 2, Week 7 (Open Enterprise 2009 with Oliver Marks)

I am not sure what’s going on, but this week promises to be one of the most hectic at work I may have experienced to date!, to the point where I am starting to feel withdrawal symptoms from my various social networks, both internal and external, that I usually hang out with and that’s something that I am not starting to enjoy much, since it brings me back memories of how I used to work in my lovely (NOT!) silo a long while ago! I have got to do something about it! And soon!

And that’s why I thought I would drop by again and put together the next blog post on the weekly progress report of my "A World Without Email" series, just before I would freak out from the whole thing! Talking about an unbalanced busyness versus burstiness, eh?

Anyway, let’s get down to the business. Here is the weekly progress report with the snapshot on what happened last week with my giving up on email at work. Good news, I can tell you!; if not , have a look into:

Yes, indeed, as you may have been able to see, I am back on track with my follow up challenge on reducing my incoming email count on to the 20 emails, or less!, a week mark. For week 7, right on target: 20 emails received, with a couple of peaks on Tuesday and Friday, but doing pretty good overall with the other days.

I was hopeful that things would settle back into the usual swing of things, yet, I can tell you, from watching what’s been happening this week so far, how I am back into the yo-yo effect I described last year in a couple of blog posts, because between yesterday and today I have already passed the total amount of emails from last week! And it’s only Tuesday!! (Ouch! Going to be a long week!).

Oh, well, let’s move on to sharing with you one interesting link that I hope you would enjoy, just as much as I did, as it touches on a recent videoconference I did with my good friend Oliver Marks on the topic of Enterprise 2.0.

Oliver is actually co-leading (along with the always inspiring Stowe Boyd) one of those really cool initiatives you know are not only very insightful, but also very much needed. Yes, certainly, I am talking about Open Enterprise 2.0. An initiative where both Stowe and Oliver are trying to "discover what enterprises are learning about Web 2.0 technologies and the practices to apply them productively" and whose results they would be presenting at the Enterprise 2.0 conference in Boston in June. Believe me, a very much worth while initiative to follow up on if you would want to figure out where the corporate world is with their adoption of social software in the enterprise (Enterprise 2.0).

So far they have been doing a good bunch of different brilliant video interviews (Watch this one with Andy McAfee or this other one with JP Rangaswami to get a taster of the quality of the conversations), along with a whole bunch of other stuff (Go through this one video, for instance, where they are both giving an update on how things are going so far …), with a bunch of really smart, thought-provoking, inspiring and rather wise thought leaders in the social computing space and last week I had the great pleasure and honour of doing a Skype videoconference with Oliver where we discussed a number of different topics:

• Social Software adoption at IBM (Where I basically describe a little bit what my day to day job is like as a social computing evangelist)
• Knowledge is power vs. Knowledge shared is power (and the state of social software adoption in Europe, as well as KM & Collaboration)
• Biggest challenge for social software … mobile (workforce) 2.0.
• Benefits of social software within the corporate firewall and beyond
• And, of course, the initiative I have been involved for the last 14 months: A World Without Email.

The video lasts for a little bit under 30 minutes and you would be able to play it from Oliver’s blog post at the Enterprise 2.0 Blog or directly from the embedded version below:

Thanks much, Oliver, for the opportunity and for the great conversation! I had a blast and thoroughly enjoyed it! Look forward to seeing you at the Enterprise 2.0 conference in Boston!

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, Busyness, Burstiness, Virtual Teams, Virtual Collaboration, Oliver Marks, Open Enterprise 2.0, oe20, oe2.0, Stowe Boyd, Enterprise 2.0 Conference, Boston, E2.0, E20conf, Social Software Adoption, Telecommuting, Business Value, Benefits, Enterprise 2.0 Blog, Trust, Flexibility, Knowledge Workers

Giving up on Work e-mail – Status Report on Week 44 to 45 (The Yo-Yo Effect Continues)

As we are about to wrap up another interesting and exciting year, and while we await for 2009 (Just around the corner!), here I go back again into creating another blog post over here trying to catch up with the weekly progress reports on how I have been doing lately giving up e-mail at work. I am sure that a few of you folks would be interested in finding out some more on how things are going or whether there may have been some drastic changes. Thus here I am again at it, sharing with you a few thoughts on what has happened for weeks 44 and 45. At the same time I will be sharing with you another interesting link I have bumped into a little while ago and which is very much related to "Thinking Outside the Inbox" theme. But one thing at a time …

In one of my recent blog posts on the subject, I mentioned how over the last few weeks I seem to be have been going through what I have been calling the yo-yo effect (i.e. an up and down incoming number of e-mails per week) and it looks like these two weeks are a continuation of that effect, because, once again, the numbers have been going up and down. Here are the progress weekly reports, so that you folks can have a look:

As you would be able to see, during week 44 I eventually got 23 e-mails, whereas for week 45 I ended up with 35. Rather intriguing to see how the numbers fluctuate, but equally interesting to see how all of that yo-yo effect changed dramatically for week 46. But that would be the subject for another upcoming blog post. For now, just to reflect how the numbers keep going up and down, but steady under the 35 e-mails range per week, which, I guess, it is not too bad! But till you get to read through the progress report from week 46 and you will see what I mean…

Finally, like I have mentioned at the beginning of this blog post, I would also like to take a couple of minutes to point you to a very relevant article, even though it was published a couple of months back!, to what I have been doing all along in this space. It was published by Amit Agarwal under the title "How to Manage Email Overload with some help of your RSS Reader" and in it it comes to mention how one of the most compelling methods for taming your e-mail inbox is to eventually move out information flows into RSS / Atom feed readers.

If you have been listening to a couple of videos I have shared on this subject of giving up on e-mail at work, you would know how, to me, an RSS / Atom feed reader has become an essential tool in helping me digest the information / knowledge I get exposed to from my various different social networks. Without my feed readers (Yes, I use a couple of them!) I am 100% sure I would not have been able to successfully move away from corporate e-mail, to the extent that without them I doubt I would be getting much work done!

Thus to such extent Amit has put together a worth while reading article where you would be able to get exposed to four different tips on how RSS feeds would be able to help you manage e-mail overload much better, to the point where you can eventually reduce a substantial amount of the messages you get exposed to on a daily basis. I am not going to expand much further on the subject, but, instead, I would like to quote over here those four tips and would then encourage you all to have a look into Amit’s entry for the rest:

- Idea 1: "Ask people to only send tips via delicious for: tag" (Or any other social bookmarking site for that matter!)
- Idea 2: "Only use contact forms that provide RSS feeds
- Idea 3: Master Dapper and Yahoo! Pipes
- Idea 4: Read all e-mail newsletters and mailing lists as RSS feeds" (This is perhaps my favourite one! You can’t imagine the huge amount of e-mail traffic I have been able to divert ever since I started with this experiment!)

See? It is not that difficult to take control over and tame the e-mail beast, right? Well, stay tuned, because very soon I will be putting together a new blog post where I will share some of the changes of what you will be seeing over here for the year we are about to begin within the next few hours… For the time being, get ready for the upcoming blog post, because it surely is going to shake the ground a bit!

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, RSS, Atom, Feeds, Newsfeed Readers, Readers, Aggregators, Amit Agarwal, Delicious, Dapper, Yahoo Pipes, Newsletters, Productivity Tips