I don’t know who to credit this to, but I love it. It has been posted so many times that the originator is lost. But, THANK YOU! to whomever it was.  (UPDATE: It is from Nasa.  Thanks, Harold!)

What I love about this is that it is simple & direct. This got me thinking… Why don’t we have more of these? So I decided to create some more. And here they are…

Blog Advantages: Two-way Constant Receive feedback Searchable Archived Interactive Conversational Smaller, faster updates 1: many:many Learning increases

RSS Advantages: Pushed to you Only what has been updated Information > time spent Constant Searchable Archived Personalized content Automatic Learning increases

Social Networking Advantages: Infinitely more resources Easily contact 1000′s of loose connections yet… Very small maintenance time Searchable Learning increases

Confession:  I am using you. As if it wasn’t obvious, but I am.  Each time I start to send an email I think, “Oh no.  That will be one more way and I have to report it out.  Isn’t there some other way to do this.  A better way?”  So the fear of reporting out a high number to you, of faithful mentor, helps remind me to use another – better – way.

Keeping it low.  1/2 to 1/3 less.  This makes me happy.  Not my lowest, but close.

What am I doing differently?

1. I use Twitter more.
2. I actually pick up the phone or walk to someone’s desk.
3. In order to avoid email I find that I need to complete another couple extra steps – be a little more prepared – and then message someone through a wiki or blog or forum.  This causes me to be on top of things a bit more than I previously would have.
4. I wait and either let it pass (and ignore it) or let it play out before acknowledging it.  This has proven very helpful.  Instead of jumping in on things, I let others try to work them out.  If they go astray I can jump in, but I don’t NEED to.
5. I use IM more (now I might need to get an unlimited IM plan on my phone   )

It isn’t a habit yet. It needs to get to that point where email is not my default mode of conversation.

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A little explanation: I ran a customer conference last week in Las Vegas.  That was it.  No regular work, no blogging, nothing.  Now that I am recovered (which is relative) I am back to real life.  Because of the conference I had an abnormally small number of emails.  (I have never texted so much in my life, though!)

I really can’t use last week as a real week, so I revert to my first week, the week before, and this week will be #2.

As you can tell, I really worked at it.  Still with only 4 working days during Week 1, I improved a huge amount.

It wasn’t easy, though!  Often I would start an email and then catch myself mid way through it.  Then the hampster in my head had to kick it up a notch: How do I communicate with this person if I can’t do it through email.  I found that I called more, used our internal system more and used Twitter more.  Sometimes I found that it was better if I didn’t contact them at all and just waited.

Oh, and what a difference it made on the # of emails I received!

Two other random thoughts:

1. Since buying my iPhone I find that I spend more time on that than I do on the computer at home.  So nice.
2. DO NOT EVER stay at the Flamingo.  I don’t care what you do!  Don’t give in.  Someone else at our company chose this.  I had never stayed there, nor did I really know anything about it (or I would have objected).  But after the mold, disgustingness, horrible service and ants in the bathroom I will never come close to that place again.  And it wasn’t just me – it was almost every single one of the conference attendees (pretty embarrassing to tell you the truth).  I thought about creating theflamingomustdie.com, but that is not how I want to be famous.  A small book could be created on our experiences – something akin to a bad nightmare.  By the way, Flamingo: Hot pink is out.