Engaged Learning

Eliminating Email? Not Quite, but I am Going to Try

Sep 2, 2008 Enterprise 2.0, Social Learning SIG, blogging

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Inspired by Luis Suarez and his “Giving up on email” quest, and the fact that I feel the need to more fully walk the talk, I am doing my part to eliminate the Outlook electrons.

Emails for this practise will only be counted from internal sources – I won’t be counting junk mail, vendor mail or outside non-work email that comes through my normal email (not that I would have any )  But if they come from another employee I will count them.  Those that I send will be counted as well.

Here is the break down (I always want to start beat boxing when I say “break down” for some reason).

I have never analyzed my emails before, but am happy to see that I receive less than I create.  You will notice that last week is not counted.  That is because I was experimenting to see if this would really work.  And I think it will!  Time will tell, but I am optimistic.

The first thing I did this morning was create a blog post and let everyone know what I am doing, and why.  One thing I have added in is that if someone want’s to get my attention with a particular discussion or wiki document, they should add my username to the tags.  My RSS feeds now pick up anything tagged with my username.

Below is a snippet of my post:

PROS:

• I don’t need to keep getting bombarded with emails every time someone replies. I can, if I want, see the culmination after a few people have chimed in. This cuts down on my viewing time and gives me back time I need.
• My days (and the tasks I do during the day) are not driven by my email. Rather, I spend longer times on one task and finish it, rather than being interrupted by many different tasks.
• I might be asking the wrong person a question and the right person (or someone who knows the answer) might see the information and give us the correct answer.
• I go to one place for all the information on the subject, not 10 different emails.
• Discussions / documents focus on one topic. Emails can branch out into other topics not related to the original. With all the emails, one can get lost and not quite find the information they are looking for later on.
• I can go back and actually find the conversation I had with someone else and remember why we decided what we did or the details of it rather than losing the email and guessing.
• If I ask a question, there is a good chance others have, or will have, the same question but now they will find the answer.
• If it is an announcement of some type, this elicits discussion – which is a big pro.
• Often what I do concerns projects. It is good to be able to go back and see what happened, when, what issues were worked through, what questions were asked, etc., for the next time.

CONS:

• I have never done this before. So it will be a change of how I do work. Assuming all goes well, this will turn into a pro.
• Those discussions will be out there. One may argue that it may ‘clog’ up GTSX (the name of our internal environment) with extra information that is not needed. But, again, if I have a question, someone, sometime will have the same question. So, again, it turns into a pro.

Now – why?  We can learn and share information more easily this way.  Natually, much of my offline communication has already gone this way.  In fact, I was commenting to my wife last night that I spend more time on my iPhone than I do our home computer.  A refreshing change!

Here is a SlideShare presentation on eliminating email.

Tags: Email, iPhone, Luis Suarez, Outlook, RSS, SlideShare