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

A World Without E-mail: One Man’s Vision of a Social Workplace – Wear Sunscreen

Usually, weekends, as most of you already know, are rather quiet over here in this blog and in most of my virtual social networking hang-out places. More than anything else, because I use that time to unwind properly; to chill out, relax, charge some batteries from that week at work and, eventually, connect with my real life social networking connections (Those who don’t live on the Web…). I guess it’s all part of that work / life integration that one has got to put together in place in order not to lose that balance. Well, this weekend has been an exception… And what an exception! Late on Friday evening, yours truly was featured on the front page of Mashable (Yes, that Mashable!) on a beautiful article put together by Amy-Mae Elliot under the title “A World Without E-mail: One Man’s Vision of a Social Workplace“.

As you can imagine, that article has got a lot to do with this initiative I have been carrying out since February 2008, originally called “Thinking Outside the Inbox” and nowadays just simply living “A World Without Email“. In it, Amy-Mae tells the story of how I got things started over two and a half years ago on giving up corporate email and, instead, making a much heavier use of social software tools and how I’m still going strong at it, right as we speak, while still employed by my current employer, IBM. If you would remember, there have been a few other publications that have echoed, in the recent past, what I have been doing so far (Starting with The New York Times, Forbes and CIO, amongst several other dozens) and Mashable’s piece is the latest one on that very same topic. Exciting stuff, to say the least!

The interesting thing from that excellent write-up by Amy is that it captures, very nicely!, not only plenty of the great discussions we had last week in preparation for the article itself, as part of the interview, but also she captured the latest progress report available, so that folks could catch up with things in the last year or so; at the same time, she has also put together, and quite nicely!, the three major tips I keep sharing with folks over and over again on how they themselves can reduce some of their inbox clutter, should they decide they would want to tackle it at some point in time. To name:

1. “Don’t Reply (to email)
2. Study your inbox (i.e. group conversations)
3. Tackle one area a week”

These are the very same tips that I talked about not long ago, when I blogged about the last progress report and where I included a link to a recent mindmap I put together on the topic as well as a recording of a customer event that I did just recently as well. So those folks who may want to find out plenty more about what this nearly 3 year old experiment has been like all along could surely have a look into those materials to find out the whole story.

Now, at this point in time, I am sure you must be thinking that I have got the job done; that I have proved it’s possible to survive in an email driven corporate world without making use of it at all and, instead, rely more heavily on social networking tools to carry out work. I guess there may be plenty of folks out there who feel that now that I have been featured in Mashable, I am done with. It’s time for me to move on. It’s time for me to go back to business and continue making use of email as before, since there may be a sense that all I am doing would just work for me and no-one else. You know, the eternal battle of the early adopter. Always go against the current. No matter what! However, that’s not the case. Quite the opposite!

Like I have mentioned in the past a couple of times, this is just another step; another move in the right direction to hopefully raise plenty more awareness of the harm that the misuse (and abuse!) of email has been causing within the enterprise for decades as a knowledge sharing and collaboration tool. To me, it’s just one more step towards continuing to push gently for that successful re-purposing of email altogether to bring it back to basics; back to where it belongs: a messaging and notification system of content that’s stored elsewhere!

Yes, to me, all of this living “A World Without Email” is just an initiative to keep pushing for more open, public and transparent interactions where multiple parties could take place and participate, where knowledge workers could help, finally, bring forward much more clarity on how they share their knowledge with others and collaborate more openly. After all, that’s the final frontier, as far as I am concerned, and Mashable’s Amy-Mae’s superb write-up is just another step in the right direction that, eventually, it will be happening!

Whatever it takes, whenever it happens, whoever decides to embark on it, I will still be there as well, wearing my sunscreen, which was my first reaction, to be honest, after I read Mashable’s article. “Wearing your sunscreen? Are you crazy?” You know, it’s still summertime, but what has got this article to do with wearing sunscreen then, you may be wondering, right? Well, I blogged about it over three years ago and thought I would finish off this blog post with it, embedding it over here, as a clear reminder of what lies ahead… Errr, what? Wait, don’t worry, watch the YouTube video clip in its entirety (It’s only 7 minutes long…) and you will see what I mean:

(Yes, Luis Suarez has got a dream, and it’s one that many of us
with our overloaded inboxes could well buy in to — a world without e-mail)

(Note: A big and special Thank You! to Amy-Mae for the great interview and wonderful article put together and to Laurie Friedman for making it happen! And another special thanks! to all of those folks who over the course of the weekend have been tweeting it, liking it, buzzing it , blogging it and sharing it across in multiple online places! Thanks ever so much!)

Technorati Tags: Amy-Mae Elliot, Social Workplace, Workplace, Knowledge Workers, Mashable, 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, Wear Sunscreen, Sunscreen, Laurie Friedman

A World Without Email — Year 3, Weeks 24 to 28 (Email Is Where Knowledge Goes to Die – The Presentation)

It has been a while now since the last progress report I have shared over here around the topic of living “A World Without Email“, that experiment that has been going on for over 2.5 years now, where one day I decided to give up on corporate email altogether and, instead, make heavier use of social networking tools to collaborate and share knowledge with other fellow knowledge workers. So I thought I would drop by today over here and share with you folks an update of how things are going, specially now that there seems to be a growing interest in demonstrating how social software tools are consistently not only helping reduce the amount of emails we receive on a daily basis, but at the same time we are starting to witness the changing role of email itself, transitioning successfully into becoming that messaging / notification system that was designed for over 40 years ago versus remaining that content repository where everything goes. Even your knowledge!

Matt Forcey put together a rather insightful blog post not long ago under the heading “Email Usage Drops 28% in Past 12 Months!” where he quotes a recent study by Nielsen “focused on how Americans spend their time online, [and] unexpectedly found that email usage has dropped by 28% over the last year“. Worth while a read, for sure! Just as much as Ethan Yarbrough‘s Email’s Role in an Enterprise 2.0 Environment: Signal Not Source where he is sharing a terrific story of how his own team is progressively changing the role of email in a business environment, moving away from that content repository format where conversations used to happen, to only serve as a notification and messaging system for content that’s stored elsewhere, in this case, social software tools.

If you remember, and if you have been reading this blog for a while now, that’s exactly what I am trying to advocate with “A World Without Email“. Yes, I do realise and acknowledge that email is not going away any time soon. And that’s probably a good thing! What we are seeing though is how email is being re-purposed into no longer becoming the bottleneck of how work gets done. How it is now part of the flow of conversations happening all over the place and, perhaps, in much better, and suitable, social spaces, so that both information and knowledge flow faster and, as a result of that, knowledge workers become more efficient and effective at what they do, which, I am sure, is what really matters at the end of the day… So how have I been doing over the last few weeks, since my last progress report, on moving away, successfully, those various email driven conversations, you may be wondering, right?

Well, things still are going really good! Actually, better than ever! Here is a snapshot of the last five weeks of incoming emails I have received:

As you would be able to see, except for last week I have been consistently getting less and less email by the week, and, even more exciting, way below the 20 emails per week mark!, which surely is making a good progress from when I started 2.5 years ago. Remember, at the beginning, before starting this experiment, I used to receive 30 to 40 emails per day! And now, 2.5 years later, it’s just 17 emails per week! Yes, indeed, you are reading it right! I’m now averaging 17 emails received per week, while the majority of my online interactions are now happening through social software tools.

So, to me, it is not just a drop of 28% in the past 12 months, but way over 90% of the email I used to get! And, not sure what you would think, but that’s *huge!* Yes! Being able to state how email is no longer the only game in town for me, quite the opposite!, actually, is a good thing. It proves it can be done! It proves I am not the only one who can make it happen. And this is when it gets really exciting! When you see other folks increasingly paying more and more attention as to how they interact with their email Inboxes and how they effectively start looking for ways of reducing such email clutter.

Very exciting, indeed! Even more when you notice it’s folks around you who are starting to ask you how you can help them eliminate most of their incoming emails and instead progress towards a much more receptive adoption of social software tools for business. That’s why I’m pretty jazzed up about seeing a whole bunch of fellow co-workers who are continuing to make efforts to reduce their email workload. To the point where entire teams are figuring out strategies to make it work for them and over the last couple of weeks I have been working with a couple of them where there is plenty of promise ahead! Yay!

But it gets better! Because over the last few weeks as well I’m starting to notice how even customers want to figure out ways on how they themselves can get rid of, or reduce substantially, their incoming email. And they seem to keep finding me out there as they search how it can be done (Double yay for #lawwe), which is really good news, because I have been invited a couple of times already to go and present to them how they themselves could live “A World Without Email“.

One of those presentations was eventually one I did last week in Germany for that one customer where they wanted to know what it was like making the transition from using email as a collaboration tool into that messaging & notification system. Thus they wanted me to speak to them for about one hour on what it would be like. Of course, I couldn’t say “No!” to it, right? I didn’t.

And the end result is this mindmap I have put together under MindMeister (One of my preferred online mindmapping tools available out there!) and which tries to explain that 2.5 year long journey of having given up on corporate email and, instead, use social software tools using four different entry points of discussion:

• Why did you do it?
• How did you do it?
• How has it changed the way we work?
• Tips on reducing email – where do you start?

Now, the great thing about MindMeister is that rather you can go to the Web site to see the mindmap itself, or, instead, you can just go through it in the embedded version attached below, which I think is a really cool way of delivering presentations. In fact, for none of these did I use any kind of slideware and it surely was a new, and quite refreshing!, way of delivering a presentation. I should do it more often! Here it is:

I think at this point in time you may be wondering whether there would also be a recording of this presentation so that you could listen to the flow of going from one node to another and learn some more about what that journey has been like in the last couple of years, right? Well, great then!, because I do have a recording of the presentation, although not the one from last week’s customer visit, but from another customer presentation I did remotely through an emeeting (Using LotusLive) and which I’m pretty excited to be sharing it across with you folks over here, in this blog.

It’s a 45MB download you can grab from here and the recording itself includes both the audio and the video, with a short introduction, so you could be able to follow the flow of the mindmap and how the various pieces fit together. It lasts for a little bit over one hour, so you may want to go and grab a cup of coffee, or tea, sit back, hit PLAY and let the show begin. And if you are looking for a one pager of the mindmap itself, I have also gone ahead and uploaded it into my Slideshare space and can be accessed through here.

Hope you enjoyed it just as much as I did putting together the mindmap, reflecting some more on what that experiment has been, and the couple of customer events I have done in the recent weeks. Somehow, I sense we are just starting to have some good fun!

(Ok, here is the thing though, after going through the various Tips on Reducing Email – Where Do You Start?, will you now be capable of Living A World Without Email …? What do you think?)

Technorati Tags: Change The World, Collaboration, Communities, Connections, Conversations, Education, Enterprise 2.0, Getting Things Done, IBM, Innovation, KM, Knowledge Management, Knowledge Sharing, Knowledge Workers, Learning, Personal Knowledge Management, PKM, Productivity, Social Computing, Social Media, Social Networking, Social Networks, Social Software, Web 2.0, Email, No-email, Challenge Your Inbox, Progress Reports, Thinking Outside the Inbox, World Without Email, Matt Forcey, Ethan Yarbrough, MindMeister, Mindmapping, Mindmaps, Slideshare, Recordings, #lawwe

Blog Talk Radio – Business Value of Social Networking: Become a Hippie 2.0!

Yesterday, if you would remember, I put together a short blog post where I was mentioning how apart from having one of those days of meetings galore jumping from one to the next, I was also looking forward to the great opportunity of participating live on the Blog Talk Radio podcasting show, hosted by John Moore, and along with one of my favourite Enterprise 2.0 people, Mark Masterson, as co-guest. Well, I am happy to confirm that the recording of that podcast episode is now available for replay.

And, boy, did we have such a good fun with that interview or not? John asked us a few rather interesting, insightful and provocative questions on what we thought were some of the major key points behind figuring out the business value of social networking. That was just a blast! What an adrenaline rush of back and forth between Mark, John and yours truly! I had such a great time!

John himself has actually put together a rather nice short blog post on that podcast under the title Social Media ROI and Hippy 2.0… It all made sense... In it he mentions how the recording lasts for about 56 minutes and it starts off at around minute 5, after he spent a little while sharing some further thoughts on the news and trends of the day / week related to social media.

I bet you may be wondering, right now, what we actually talked about during the course of nearly one hour, right? Yes, I agree with you, that’s a long time to spend on a podcast, but it certainly was such a good fun that I don’t think none of us minded at all! Thus here you have got some of the headlines and an annotation of two on the topics that we covered during that live podcast show:

• Business Value of Social Networking: Where we talked about how sometimes it’s much more effective, and productive, to focus on figuring out how to get the most of all of these social networking tools as our next generation of business tools to help us collaborate and share our knowledge more efficiently than trying to figure out the Return On Investment (ROI) of those social interactions without having even gotten things started in the first place!

  How it may prove to be much more convenient to demonstrate how social software can change the way we interact with customers, as well as with the rest of our peers, by humanising those very same business interactions helping nurture, even better, our own personal business relationships. We eventually shared plenty of thoughts and ideas of how this could pave out for almost any business out there!

• Living "A World Without Email": Yes, of course, we couldn’t miss out on this one, could we? Most of you folks, regular readers of this blog, already know quite a bit what this topic would be about, but what you may be interested in is the part of the conversation where I shared some further insights on demonstrating the ROI of giving up on corporate email and what it’s meant not only for me as a knowledge worker, but also for the organisation I work for and for those other peers I get to interact on a regular basis.

  Reducing your corporate email conversations by over 95% and instead move those into open social software spaces is one heck of a success story, don’t you think? Specially when over 3.5 years ago, most people felt I was crazy for doing such thing in such an email driven corporation like IBM (And probably like most of them out there as well!) and today, more and more teams and groups are also seeing such substantial reduction with their incoming emails by utilising more various different social tools. I may not be that crazy after all …

• Or, maybe, I still am! Because the other topic we talked about, during that one hour conversation and which we covered quite extensively, was a new crazy? idea that I came up with a few days back and which is picking a rather nice momentum and plenty of traction. Of course, I am talking about Hippie 2.0.

  Who would have thought about that? An initial blog post that I put together and shared across a little bit weary about it (I wasn’t sure whether it was going to strike a chord or not!), eventually has been raising a huge amount of rather interesting and very refreshing conversations on the true nature of embracing social networking beyond the business context, that is, how it is affecting us all as a society.

  That blog entry so far is one of the most popular threads on this blog and has sparked a good number of developments that will certainly keep a bunch of us buzzing for a little while longer! Who knows, perhaps for a long while…

  The thing is that we already have got a Web site up and running under Hippie 2.0 (Using Posterous at the moment and with a unique opportunity to have an open space where everyone can contribute with whatever the relevant content); we talked extensively about it on yesterday’s live podcast; a few people have already contributed some top notch content (Including some fun stuff!); and a few folks have been leaving comments already throughout the various entries and we have got a bunch of other really cool things coming up!

  I say we because my good friend Jay Deragon has been doing an outstanding job in pushing forward some of the content you will see on the Web site when you head over there. And for that, I am incredibly grateful! Thanks ever so much, Jay!! Really appreciate all of your efforts and glad you, too, feel the same way about this crazy idea!

Right, there were plenty of things related to social networking and proving its business value altogether that we talked about during that live podcasting episode over at Blog Talk Radio, but I think I am going to stop commenting further on it for now. Instead, I would encourage you all to go and listen to it, by perhaps quoting one of the best live tweets that people shared across during the show and which clearly represents the true spirit behind such a movement as Hippie 2.0:

"If you focus on fear, you’ll get fear. If you focus on humor, you’ll get laughs" (Superb quote from Mark captured by Susan Scrupski)

I hope you have enjoyed listening to the episode, just as much as we did during the live recording of the podcast. Like I said above, I had a great time participating in it and from here I just would want to take this opportunity to thank John Moore for inviting both Mark and myself into the show, to Mark for being such great fun, smart, insightful, witty, and another Hippie 2.0, like yours truly, and, finally, to Eric Andersen for helping facilitate the connection over … Twitter!

Thanks ever so much, guys! It’s been a great pleasure and hope to see you all soon over at Hippies20.com!

Tags: Blog Talk Radio, Podcasts, Podcasting, Radio Shows, Mark Masterson, John Moore, Business Value, ROI, Return On Investment, Hippies 2.0, Hippie2.0, Enterprise 2.0, Social Software, Social Networking, Social Computing, Social Media, Collaboration, Communities, Learning, Knowledge Sharing, KM, Knowledge Management, Remote Collaboration, Innovation, Networking, Social Networks, Conversations, Dialogue, Communication, Connections, Relationships, Productivity, Productivity 2.0, email, Re-purposing Email, No-Email, Challenge Your Inbox, Progress Reports, Thinking Outside the Inbox, Information Overload, A World Without Email, Eric Andersen, Susan Scrupski, ITSinsider, Jay Deragon, Posterous, Twitter