“Email is where knowledge goes to die” — Bill French
Last season on Spark, Nora talked to researcher danah boyd about her idea of an email sabbatical.
I believe that email eradicates any benefits gained from taking a vacation by collecting mold and spitting it back out at you the moment you return. As such, I’ve trained my beloved INBOX to reject all email during vacation. I give it a little help in the form of a .procmail file that sends everything directly to /dev/null. The effect is very simple. You cannot put anything in my queue while I’m away (however lovingly you intend it) and I come home to a clean INBOX.
After I heard that interview, I immediately wondered if it’s possible to switch off email permanently. Sure, I know a handful of people who don’t use email at all (mostly older relatives), but that’s because they’ve never used email. So, once you’ve started using email, is it possible to go back?
Enter Luis Suarez. Luis works for IBM, and in February 2008, he completely gave up on corporate email:
I know, you can call me crazy now! You can say I am out of my mind, but the truth is that I am now on the 5th day of taking such a radical approach to my daily workload and the overall experience has been tremendous!! In all of those 5 days I have received a total number of 45 e-mails. Yes, you are reading it right!! 45 e-mails!! When normally on a daily basis I would be getting, on busy days, between 30 to 45! A day!! But this time around, things have been different. I have been telling people I will no longer be responding to e-mails, because the more I respond, the more I get.
Since then, Luis has been documenting his attempt to remove corporate email from his life on his blog. He regularly publishes updates showing the number of email messages he gets:
Now, Luis isn’t some sort of neo-Luddite. Rather, he’s a social software evangelist for IBM, and has replaced much of what used to happen via email with social tools like Facebook, Twitter, and other internal tools.
I have decided that if I want to demonstrate how powerful social computing is within the corporate world, and beyond, I am going to make a complete shift to it and try to provoke as many conversations as possible out in the open space of social software.
You can get a very good introduction to Luis’s goals is in this video from the Web 2.0 Expo Europe: Thinking Outside the Inbox:
This week, Nora will interview Luis Suarez about his world without email. Do you have a question for Luis? Do you think you could simply stop getting email in your workplace? Leave your comments below.
Hi Dan! Thanks ever so much for putting together this blog post reflecting on our upcoming interview on Wednesday. I am surely looking forward to it myself and I just thought I would drop a quick comment over here as a teaser for those folks who may be attending the show…
Over those 18 months what I have been doing is two things: diversifying and fragmenting my corporate Inbox, in such a way that from the very beginning I have been able to prove how you can be as effective, if not more, as ever not making use of email, but instead rely much more heavily on social software tools and, eventually, in my various networks. Trust plays a key role in doing this. Trust that I surely don't see coming into my Inbox, specially when folks start abusing the .CC and .BCC fields. Because after all they all feel my "inbox is a todo list that anyone in the world can write to".
Well, maybe not … Look forward to our conversation on Wednesday, and, folks, please feel free to share your questions ahead of time over here or during the show! Thanks again for the opportunity to share with your audience what it is like taking your own productivity back!
I've tried to do the same thing with much less success; the more I move things away from email the more comes in. (For example, I set up a blog server for everyone to use. The first comment? "That's great! Can you email everyone when there's a new post?") How did you overcome the corporate inertia to do everything via email?
(Not sure whether the first comment went through in the right place or not, so here it goes, once more, just in case …) @Peter J, thanks for the comments. It's funny, I got through the very same thing at the very beginning and, although it may sound as a blunt move, what I did was not to give in and send an email whenever I had a blog post in my blog; what I did was I educated folks on how to subscribe to the blog through RSS feeds, along with some other interesting blogs to add some variety and they haven't been back.
Sometimes it's all about perseverance and getting the message across you are "serious" about living "A World Without Email"; how? By educating people on how they themselves can apply some of those principles on thinking outside the inbox. Once you show them, once you let them see how you care by spending part of your time educating them, it's something they will do naturally themselves and funny enough they won't go back and they would become themselves advocates of what I / we are doing …
Obviously I have a very different outlook on this. My ONLY beef about e-mail is the people who supposedly have e-mail but who don't respond to a direct request for information. Then I have to resort to phoning them <sigh>.
I see e-mail as being just like the telephone but WAY, WAY better. You'd like to ditch e-mail? I'd like to ditch the phone. Nothing drives me nuts faster than phone tag, answering machines, voice mail….
Since I'm retired, my situation is different, but when I was working for a living, I far preferred e-mail to face-to-face meetings OR phone messages because it allowed me to respond when I had time and was much less of a disruption to my day. I still feel that way.
Facebook, blogs and such are very useful in their own way but we're talking about e-mail as a communication device, right? BTW, people who want an e-mail when there's a new blog post need to be shown how to use blog feeds.
I have wondered in the past whether the phone call will become less common as we come to rely more on 'asynchronous' communication, like using social software. Linda Stone, (at lindastone.net) another upcoming Spark guest, talks about how young people coming into the workplace see phone calls as intrusive, at least when they are with people other than close friends.
Funny thing about phone calls in my workplace. I find myself pinging my collegues with communicator to ask if they can accept a call. Sometimes the response is yes
other times I have to revert to email…
@Dave McC, interesting points, indeed, with regards to the phone usage. I must say though I still prefer the phone to writing (Wherever). And I will explain why. I am not very much in favour of cold calls without a context and perhaps even a connection with the other person. I rarely get any of those calls anymore. Even more strange I haven't used my voicemail in years for such kind of calls, they just don't get through; they prefer other means of engagement.
Yet, I use the phone on a regular basis. Why? Because when it is a concerted call with a colleague or a set of colleagues, I am not sure about you, Dave, but I can talk much much faster than write, therefore I can communicate more through my voice than writing a few words. My voice also includes a number of "features" that give hints to folks over the phone on how the conversations are going. My voice shows that cadence that email doesn't have, for instance, and if I can nail down an issue with a one or two minute phone conversation, vs. an ever lasting email threaded discussion then I am surely going to do that!
In most cases, the interesting challenge is to know how to stop those interactions once you have addressed the issue. Most people will keep talking because they don't want to be rude cutting people off. I had a hard time on that one, too, when I started, but then again I learned how to do it overtime with practice and right now I may be on the phone for periods of 2 to 3 to 5 minutes talking away and when the conversation is over it is over. I realise, as well as my peers, that there are always other times when we can "properly" catch up with those more inter-personal conversations. And that has worked a treat so far.