Giving up on Work e-mail – Status Report on Week 5

As you may well remember, last Friday I was in Madrid hosting a workshop on IBM Lotus Enterprise 2.0 and I must say that it was such a hectic and incredibly inspiring day overall that I didn’t get a chance to create the weekly blog post detailing what my progress report has been for the entire week last week as I was getting done with week 5 without work related e-mail. So I thought I would spend a few minutes today to share with you what has happened last week, specially for those who may have been following this experiment I have been having for the last few weeks.

To get things started here is a screen shot of the weekly report, week by week, and entering already the sixth week:

As you may have noticed, last week was a remarkable one! For the fifth time in a row the number of incoming e-mails has gone down again from the previous week, and this time around quite significantly, going from 39 to 35!! Yes, that’s 35 you are reading here!! That means an average of 7 e-mails a day vs. the 30 to 45 I used to get way before I got things going. Pretty impressive!!

I am actually starting to enjoy it more and more, as diverting most of the conversations to online social software spaces where I get to hang out has helped me get rid of that stress factor that e-mail is, specially when you come back from a trip, a vacation, a customer visit, a conference, a workshop, you name it. It has helped me to just carry out all of those social software interactions, while away, with the exact same outcome than e-mail, but a much faster response, too!

At the same time, and this is the part I am enjoying the most, I have finally given up on that famous cliche I used to go with: "Catching up with e-mail after a few days gone!". Well, that is no longer there. It’s just getting to work in the morning and be productive from the very first moment. Priceless!

Finally, one of the major highlights from last week’s escaping e-mail has been the fact that more and more people keep talking about it, so much so that during the course of this week I’ll be doing a couple of interviews with journalists as well, that I confirmed last week, and with whom I am going to be sharing my experiences on how the experiment is going and what I am trying to achieve with it, i.e. moving away from e-mail for public conversations into the social software space. And at the same time get folks to question and challenge the validity of the various e-mails they receive on a daily basis. Thus stay tuned for those, as I am hoping to be able to link to them very soon!

And this coming Friday I’ll be sharing another blog post with this week’s report. So far starting really good! … 7 mails today! 🙂

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, Conversations, Knowledge Sharing, KM, Knowledge Management, Collaboration 2.0, e-mail Backlog, email Backlog, Stress