As I am getting ready to travel again to the US tomorrow morning, to attend IBM‘s Web 2.0 and Beyond summit, here we are, once more, putting together some thoughts on the subject of my quest to give up e-mail, work related e-mail, that is. This past week about to finish didn’t sort of produce lots of interesting links related to this particular experiment of re-purposing e-mail, except perhaps the excellent article put together by Darren Rowse under the title From 10000 to 0 Emails in an Inbox in 24 Hours, which comes to explain how you can make use of GMail to process a huge amount of e-mail in just a few hours! Yes, just like you are reading on the title of the article: 10000 e-mail messages!
Must admit that, as you may have well been reading all along, my new mantra is on trying to give up just on work related e-mail, since I don’t get enough e-mail traffic externally, but if there is ever a chance where that would change I, for sure, would be having a good look again at Darren’s blog post and start applying some of those different techniques to handle large chunks of e-mail in a short period of time.
But for now, let’s keep things short again, so that I can finish up with all the packing and get some rest before the long trip tomorrow. Here is the screen shot from the weekly report from this week about to finish on the amount of e-mails I have received thus far:
As you may have been able to see, the number of incoming e-mails has increased a tiny bit, to 38, compared to the lowest number ever I got from last week on 34. I have also highlighted the highest number of e-mails received, on 47, so you can have a look at the main differences. So a little bit more than last week’s, but far away from that figure of nearly 50.
Thus one of the conclusions I have reached over the last couple of weeks is how I feel that over time it’s going to lower down that overall figure below the mark of 30 e-mails and perhaps not reaching further up more than 40. So depending on how it would go over the next couple of weeks, I may start pacing out these weekly reports, if they figures continue to settle in between the 30 and 40 a week, which I am not sure what you would think about, but to me is a huge improvement already, if you come to think that figure of 30 to 40 e-mails a week I am getting nowadays is what I used to get a day before I got things started. So, to me, that’s a massive improvement and over time, even though I will still continue to try to keep it on the low side, I sense I would have to come to terms with considering the 30 to 40 mark a really good start!
I know that for most folks out there, receiving 30 to 40 e-mails a day, before I got started with this experiment, was probably a very low mark already, compared to those who may be getting 100 to 200 e-mails a day, but I must say that the reason why I got that low mark already before getting started was because I have been diverting most of those conversations through e-mail into social computing tools, since I have been using them already for several months / years. But it is perhaps now when I have taken things to the extreme where I am seeing all of the various benefits.
This coming week, about to get started tomorrow, is going to be another interesting one, since I am going to be away from my home office the entire week attending a conference event where I am not so sure just yet what kind of connection there would be and then will be busy for the rest of the week with some more meetings and gatherings with friends and fellow IBM colleagues. Thus we shall see what happens. Hopefully, folks would keep finding the right social / collaborative tool to get in touch and although I will be blogging during the entire week on my experiences during the conference event, it will be intriguing to figure out what will happen. The first time I went away for the entire I eventually got less than 40 e-mails. Let’s see what happens this week…
Tags: IBM, 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, Progress Reports, Knowledge Sharing, KM, Knowledge Management, Collaboration 2.0, Communication, Private, Confidential, Darren Rowse, GMail, Summit, Inbox
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