On dumping email

Hi Dennis! Thanks a bunch for putting together this blog post and for sharing your thoughts on my experiences from last week. I must say that I agree with you completely that it is not easy to actually go and make use of tools that in most cases they are not even on a full production environment versus e-mail, which has been running quite all right for decades. It brings in a whole new aspect of how collaboration and knowledge sharing takes place in an environment you are never sure whether it is going to work or not! So I can relate with what you mean.

However, does that mean I am going to give up on it all? No, not a chance! I have seen the light, I have seen the live without stress due to an overwhelming amount of e-mails asking very similar things and having to reply the same thing over and over again, I have seen heaven not getting large attachments in e-mail that help exceed my e-mail quota. In short, no, I am not going to give up on it any time soon!

I will keep it going, I will keep experimenting. I am eventually tailoring my usual pitch on social computing to adapt it to these very same needs hoping to keep spreading the message of what's possible. I want to prove it *is* possible to be as productive, if not more, without e-mail. Yes, I know there would be many hurdles out there, but I am willing to fight them. For sure.

This week, I am on the process of writing the progress report as we speak, has not been very good either. And although the tools this time around worked out all right, it was something else that provoked an increase in the number of e-mails. Something that was my own fault and you will be able to read very soon what I mean with that.

Thanks for the support and for the enlightening discussions. I know it is a very steep road, or, like Phil mentioned, it's like boiling the ocean, but for as long as I can and have the energy I'll keep trying it. We all need to start somewhere. I decided about it 7 weeks ago and so far I'm much better off. Yes, like I said, not going back to a stressful life handling e-mail after e-mail of something that we all know should be stored on a public / open space for everyone to access!

With regards to the other comments, @alastair, not to worry, I am currently fine tuning the collaboration and knowledge sharing, along with social software tools I am using and very shortly I will start creating a series of blog posts where I will detail which ones have been, to me, the ones I have found the most helpful. Wikis is one of them, indeed, but not the only one. In fact, it is not the first one I eventually get to use, but certainly on the Top 5. Stay tuned for more to come on my external blogs.

@Phil, amen to all what you said above! Right, spot on the money, for sure! Thanks for putting it together so nicely! It looks like it would be the two of us boiling the ocean. Can I have some more matches, please? :-D

I too want to move away from email. Not because I hate email (I don't) but because it dissipates information. It is a tool ill-suited to group wisdom.

Over the long haul a customer (a current one or future one) is better served by collecting and aggregating information. I think they call this "re-inventing the wheel" or some silly thing like that. Unthinking collection of information is evil. You also have to add a vigorous dose of "wheat vs. chaff" control. But the basic point is still true. We are pygmies standing on the shoulders of giants (or something).

Something captured in a wiki/blog/whatever remains there for the next person to learn from. The information stays there because it was placed there, deliberately.

Emails are not deliberately aggregated and collected. Someone who sends or receives an email must not only take care of the task at hand (write an email or read an email) but must then take the additional step of having a thought ("Oh, this is important, I must save it somewhere") and follow through with the extremely difficult task of actually doing so.

When I say extremely difficult I am not being facetious. Saving an email from your inbox and into another repository is a task that flies in the face of basic human nature (sloth). It requires a series of thoughts and decisions ("This is important" "Where should it go? It should go there") and it requires a system that presents as few barriers to action as possible. It is far easier for your average person to go "Meh," and move onward to another task. Later that year, 1,500 (or 15,000) emails in the inbox later, the person is in no position to go through the filing process that is necessary. Summary execution (emails, not the person) is the only way out.

(Which, incidentally, is why www.worldox.com is as wonderful as it is. It is trivially easy to get emails out of Outlook and into the filing system in real time).

This means that email-based knowledge systems are doomed because they run counter to basic human behavior. Entropy favors deletion of email and loss of the information inside the messages.

It is easier to move away from email for internal communications. Not easy, easier.

However, for my dealings with the outside world (oh, those funny people that give me money to do stuff for them), I have to meet them where they are. Changing the behavior of a 55-yr old banker in Zurich is a "boil the ocean" endeavor.

Yet I persist in boiling the ocean. Hand me another pack of matches, will ya?

[Krupo resists urge to make snarky remark about the "Notify me of follow up comments via e-mail" below this text box]

Failed.

:)

As I understand it, Luis is trying to push as much via the internal wiki as possible. Given he's a knowledge worker that makes sense and is something that could be applied to many service businesses. The problem comes in selecting the right way to do this. IBM will say if you're a Notes house then its Connections stuff is the way to go. If Sharepoint then it could be Atlassian Confluence. But these are not the only choices.

yes please!!! - will he share some of his methods?