Accept no substitutes

Category: #noemail (Page 4 of 10)

Recording of #noemail Day Hangout with Luis Suarez and Paul Lancaster

Paul Lancaster of Sage (UK) aka @lordlancaster, Luis Suarez of IBM Spain (joining the Hangout from the Canary Islands) and I did a Google Hangout to discuss International #noemailday, #noemail and #lawwe (Living in A World Without Email). Good to chat with my international #noemail friends about what we do (and don’t do), how we’ve done it, and what we encourage others to do (and not do).

Time’s a-wastin’ (doing email) – #noemail

Gideon Lichfield writing in Quartz notes: You are wasting your time on email. Now more than ever. Quit! Average email reply time in 2012 went up to 2.5 Days from 2.2 days in 2011. (according to Cue.com which also notes that dogs are mentioned more often than cats in corporate email. 38% vs 32%).

Wasted time waiting for email replies

Wasted time waiting for email replies

The forward thinking Lichfield also observes:

On current trends, then, if email response times keep increasing by 10% a year, and assuming that an average postal delivery time in your country is two days, I estimate that by approximately 2020 it will be faster to get an answer from someone by writing a letter than by sending an email.

(his bold statement)

Be ahead of the pack; begin with #noemail today (really you should give some announcement beforehand. See suggestions throughout this blog for how to quit with grace).

No Email Day Approaches – 4 Good #noemail stories on its Eve

No Email Day
Tomorrow 12/12/12 is No Mail Day. The second No Email Day. The first was 11/11/11. The idea is to try to go 24 hours without email. What to use in its place? Most anything else from F2F, Phone, txt, social media or smoke signals.

Here are several #noemail stories to keep you warm as we approach the Day. Turn up the gas log fire. Burn a few pixels. Relax. As Mother Jones said: “Sit down and read. Educate yourself for the coming conflicts.”

BaseLine presents a report in the dreaded slide show format called “Workers Can’t (or Won’t) Escape From Their eMail”.

The BaseLine report is a retelling of the Minecast reports filed under “The Shape of Email” .

The first report “What Mimecast knows about email” looks at the inboxes of corporate email users in a handy interactive infographic format. Mimecast is unique in that they survey users in the US, UK and South Africa. Some small differences there to be seen.

The second report “What end users think” looks at user opinions and deceptions. For example, 25% of those surveyed say that they sent emails late at night from home in order to show their commitment to their jobs. 57% reported spending over half their work day on email (27% spent writing; 30% spent reading).

A third report or infographic looks at “What IT Professionals Think” about their email. Only 30% of IT professionals delete mail from their archives. 64% fear that social media poses a security risk. Only 1 in 5 or 20% believe that social media has an impact on email use.

Not exactly social or #noemail related, well perhaps indirectly related: The Pew Research Center’s Excellence in Journalism Project released a new report on the “Demographics of Mobile News” . The data represented by Poynter shows a significant change in device use from smartphone to tablet at about age 50 (more granularity of data would be helpful in understanding the points and trends of change). One simple explanation, that I’ve been giving out at my recent talks, is that this is exactly the age that our eyes begin to change. When we need, but resist bifocals. When the print is just too damn small!. The rise of tablets will hasten the death of email among the group most resistant to change — men over 50.

Tomorrow, enjoy #noemail on No Email Day.

Smartphone vs Tablet

Trouble breathing? Stop reading email – #noemail

Kind of an old story from Linda Stone — originally 2008 at O’Reilly’s Radar and at Huffington Post then revisited on her Attention Project in 2009 –, but just covered by Business Insider today. Linda Stone documents her own case of email apnea or holding your breath while reading email. Stone followed up her experience with broader research to discover that “80% of the people appeared to have email apnea—in other words, they held their breath or otherwise interrupted normal breathing.”

Also noticed by Business Insider : Gloria J. Mark and Stephen Voida of University of California, Irvine’s Department of Informatics with Armand V. Cardello of U.S. Army Natick Soldier R, D & E Center warn us “There will always be new “zombies” lurking with advances in information technology” in their 2012 paper “A Pace Not Dictated by Electrons: An Empirical Study of Work Without Email” [PDF].

Don’t be a Zombie. Breathe easy. Om Om #noemail

MMMMail to RSS; Yammer at $MSFT #noemail

mmmmail
Just learned of a nice anonymous & disposable email to RSS tool called mmmmail. mmmmail says “you can choose any email address in the mmmmail.com domain and use it at your own will. All email sent to this email address of your choice can then be retrieved as an RSS feed.” A very nice way to collect and manage activity streams from various lists or even people that you’d like to read in an organized way. Simple; the way I like it.

Yammer
Yammer, the great corporate IM service/product, was bought by Microsoft this summer for $1.2Billion(US). Many of us wondered if Yammer could survive or would be simply left alone (more or less like Skype). s it turns out Yammer looks to be a source for not only changes to Microsoft products — to be integrated with Skype it’s rumored into a new Office Suite in the sky –, but also as a corporate culture changer for the Redmond giant itself. Microsoft could undergo a change from email culture to IM culture as IBM did famously over a decade ago. This is not just about Yammer as a communications tool though. PC World reports that Yammer’s quick incremental release culture is being touted as a culture changer for developers. “Specifically, Microsoft sees great value in the way Yammer introduces weekly changes and new features to its cloud-hosted suite and then closely monitors their usage to determine if they are useful to customers.”

#noemail on Mystery Roach WKNC

Mystery Roach
I spent a delightful, if early, morning on Saturday (Nov 3) as a guest of La Barba Rossa and his wife Old Shoes on the Mystery Roach show at NCSU’s WKNC 88.1FM.
La Barba Rossa specializes in relatively obscure musics of the 60s and 70s mostly of the progressive rock genre plus Fusion, Psychedelic, Garage, and noise. That means I could request and get some play for early Mothers of Invention “Who Are The Brain Police?” (1966) even though WKNC no longer has turntables. La Barba Rossa also found and played the obscure Gene Clark song “Elevator Operator” but I’m not sure if we were hearing the version that I recall (at the link in this sentence). [Yes I have both LPs on vinyl].
Old Shoes, who is also Mrs. La Barba Rossa, is a PhD student in NCSU’s Communication, Rhetoric and Digital Media program which enriched the #noemail part of the conversation.
A fun couple of hours of music and talk back at my undergrad institution. And amusingly the music was pretty much of the period of my undergrad years (68 – 72).
La Barba Rossa promises that he’ll post a version of the show soon. I’ll add a link here once I have it.

La Barba Rossa is cleaning the copyrighted material (the songs) from the show. In the meantime, here’s a look at the talk I did at NCSU Computer Science for the Fidelity Investment Leadership in Technology series. Note the “I voted EARLY” sticker.

#noemail – Twitter analysis from Beevolve; Harvard BR on less email; Notify Me Not

I had a great time revisiting the Computer Science Department at North Carolina State last week. A very friendly, but smart crowd of folks and great hosts. There will be a video here eventually, I hear.

Kam Woods points me (and now you) to Beevolve’s “An Exhaustive Study of Twitter Users Across the World” done with Beevolve’s own analytics software. Nice findings here that support some of the recent Pew studies. “A twitter user on average has 208 followers” But most, 81%, have 50 followers or less. Amusing display of theme colors vs gender and much more. Fun and informative.

@mattnowak1 alerts us to “How to Break Free from Email Jail”
by Daniel Markovitz at Harvard Business Review’s blog network from this past August. Among other things in this brief article is a fairly unique use of Dropbox for social sharing. Not just for upload and download, but for group work management. Recommended.

Speaking of brief, Thorin Klosowski at TechCrunch’s Life Hacker turns in two slim paragraphs and a large graphic to make us aware of “Notify Me Not,” a web app that opts you out of notifications from services like Facebook, LinkedIn, Pinterest and the like — or don’t like. Simple and deadly.

#noemail – Exformatics Ditch Internal Emails

Exformatics

Okay so Denmark-based Exformatics does have a dog in the fight; they make and market the Anywhere app which let’s you manage activity streams more effectively on your mobile devices. But that also means that they will soon have an even deeper understanding of activity stream management throughout their company.

First payoffs? During #nomail January, all email use dropped 55% and yielded streams of more focused and better shared information. Largest drops in email use was among management — less meaningless CC, acknowledgements, “here’s my report,” etc. “CTO Morten Marquard managed to cut the amount of emails to 1/3 compared to November 2011.”

“We spend a disproportionate amount of time reading, contemplating and answering emails, that could have been dealt with far more rapidly and more efficiently face to face, in the activity stream or via the designated task concept in our intranet solution. We want to get rid of internal emails. Externally, we have to use email for communicating with customers and suppliers – at least for now,” Morten Marquard, CTO in Exformatics says.

The substitute for internal emails is activity streams – the business oriented equivalent of statuses in e.g. Facebook, Google+ and other social media. The activity stream is central in the solution for intelligent Enterprise Content and information Management that is used by the employees. Instead of filling up individual inboxes with notes, questions, tasks, these can be shared on a specific activity, case or project. This way, employees with already full schedules get rid of context switching and interruptions from email popups.

Full article at SharePoint Europe.

#noemail – Atlantic on Dark Net; Fast Company on Pony Express; Me on Ages

During the time I was engaging with the comment stream for yesterday’s News and Observer article, most recently titled “Paul Jones has said good bye and good riddance to email”. I made a little chart explaining the relationship between age and email attitude:

Under 16 = what’s email?
16 – 25 = email is for The Man
25 – 35 = my Boss makes me use email, but I usually text when I can
35 – 50 = I wish I could quit email but I want to be The Man
50 – 70 = I am The Man. How can I possibly … w/o email?
70 – ?? = what’s email?

Interestingly enough, the categories aren’t supported just by my experience and by the various Pew studies that I’ve kept up with for my classes, but also by a nice chart included in Hootsuite CEO Ryan Holmes’ same day article in Fast Company “Email is the Pony Express–And It’s Time to Put It Down.”
Percent Change in Time Spent Using Web-based Email

Ryan also includes a 5 point indictment of email. Briefly, email is: an unproductivity tool, not collaborative, not social, a black hole, and finally a very bad way to share documents. Yes, you heard it here first (unless you got it from @elsua earlier), but Ryan’s article does a very good job of clear statements of these problems. Recommended.

Not to be left out Alexis Madrigal at The Atlantic notices that there is a “Dark Social: We Have the Whole History of the Web Wrong” in which he discovers that most sharing in person to person is via IM and email and so is unlikely to be traced except by inference in studying reference logs at websites like The Atlantic. Madrigal offers some good data from some reliable sources — again including The Atlantic web logs — but the definition of Dark Social and the question of influence remains open for further discussion. For example, an article gets hot on Reddit or –according to Mardigal– hits various listservs or whatever. That’s when it really takes off. But that is the exception. “Day after day, though, dark social is nearly always [The Atlantic’s] top referral source.”

The real question here is what is the “whatever,” the “Dark Social.” Is it text, IM, email, listservs, forums, a stop at the water cooler? And more interesting even to me, are there trends in movement toward mobile, toward IM, toward text or even toward email?

#noemail in News & Observer

David Menconi wrote a nice — and mostly correct — article about my way of doing #nomail that came out today as “Email-free UNC-CH professor set to prove there are better ways to communicate.”

I would write more, but SOMEONE ON TEH INTERNETS IS WRONG! And I must straighten them out.

Thanks to Travis Long for the good photo that goes along with the article.

Errata:

In the box that accompanies the article there are a couple of errors:
“Opened” should be “OpenID”
“RS web feeds for Liters” should be “RSS web feeds for Listservs”

#noemail at NCSU CSC Thursday October 18, 6 pm

Repost of this announcement from last month. It’s coming up soon. This Thursday! See you there.

Paul Jones with hand thoughtfully on chin
I’ll be one of the speakers in this fall’s Fidelity Investments “Leadership in Technology”
Executive Speakers Series
at the North Carolina State University Computer Science Department on Thursday October 18 at 6 pm.

Who: Paul Jones
When: Thursday, October 18. 6 pm.
Where: Room 1231, EB2 aka Engineering Building II on NCSU’s Centennial Campus. The East half of EB2 is the Department of Computer Science (the West half being Electrical and Computer Engineering). EB2 is a large building – about two blocks wide – so it is worth paying attention to where you are. Classroom 1231 is close to the right end of EB2, on the main level.
Directions: http://www.csc.ncsu.edu/department/map/
What: #noemail – Why you could/should/must use better ways of communicating than email!

Abstract: Nearly 30 years ago Paul Jones began working on unified messaging systems leading from Call-OS, USENET, WYLBUR, TSO, BITNET, DARPA, ARPA to modern (for its time) SMTP mail. That was then, and this is now. Email has become a zombie that doesn’t realize that it’s dead and falling apart, a vampire that sucks your life’s blood away slowly each night. You’ve probably noticed this yourself. Jones has put email behind him. In an attempt to atone for his part for inflicting email on UNC, he is exploring alternatives to email with a shotgun and a wooden stake (and Facebook, Twitter, Google+, etc.) as his tools. This talk with touch on the sad beginnings of email, offer some atonement for Jones’ part in the mess, and discuss trends and alternatives needed to achieve the Logic and Destiny of #noemail.

Official YouTube of the talk is now posted:

Verging on #noemail – Paul Miller vs Aaron Levie

The Verge
Nation Hahn points me to two battling posts at The Verge.

There we first find Verge writer Paul Miller fed up with email, and with the whole of the Interwebz, unleashes a blast about what he has missed lately by not reading email — people assume he got the email and when he didn’t. he missed out on some parties or told about a surprise party.

Note to social butterflies: keep your mail if you are over 35. Under 35s don’t expect their pals to have read messages as email. This last not noticed by Miller BTW.

Miller reflects on the first six months of his year off the Net of which his highly justified #noemail rant is one installment.

Next up is a TigerBeat-style interview with Aaron Levie, CEO of Box.com, — Box itself a better alternative to email for many activities. Especially for collaboration. Aaron feels burned by Wave. It didn’t work. It was too early. He claims that email works because it’s built on open standards (NB I have been involved in Open Source for just over a quarter century now). What Aaron misses is that Wave was also an open standard — and somewhere it still is or could be reused in an improved manner. So much for the basis of Levie’s claim that: “Email can’t die — it’s an open standard that works everywhere and for everyone.”

The very good news is that Levie’s own company is leading the way toward the final interment of email. Miller, on the other hand, comes off as little more than a techie forced to dress up unconvincingly as a Luddite, an amusing writer handed an offhand stunt script by his editor doing the best that he can — with a little help from his friends.

Trolling email – another reason for #noemail

E-mails from an A**hole

It’s not just spam. It’s not just phishing. Although both would be enough reason to go with a more whitelisted, mobile, terse, collaborative communications solution than email.

There’s also trolling as best seen done by the funny and offensive E-mails from an asshole at DontEvenReply.com

Of course, it’s NSFW at most places of work.

Be brave. Be steadfast. Be sane. Don’t even reply. Or better just go #noemail.

Kramer upgrades from (paper mail) – #noemail

Kramer has had enough of mail. The old technology is too annoying and unreliable. He wants something better. He wants out of mail. And he tells that to the USPS. Via Andy Bechtel.

Unfortunately there is no USPS for email. But my autoresponder allows me to do something similar to what Kramer is after.

Enjoy.

October 18 – #noemail at NC State Computer Science/Fidelity Investments Series

Paul Jones with hand thoughtfully on chin
I’ll be one of the speakers in this fall’s Fidelity Investments “Leadership in Technology”
Executive Speakers Series
at the North Carolina State University Computer Science Department on Thursday October 18 at 6 pm.

Who: Paul Jones
When: Thursday, October 18. 6 pm.
Where: Room 1231, EB2 aka Engineering Building II on NCSU’s Centennial Campus. The East half of EB2 is the Department of Computer Science (the West half being Electrical and Computer Engineering). EB2 is a large building – about two blocks wide – so it is worth paying attention to where you are. Classroom 1231 is close to the right end of EB2, on the main level.
Directions: http://www.csc.ncsu.edu/department/map/
What: #noemail – Why you could/should/must use better ways of communicating than email!

Abstract: Nearly 30 years ago Paul Jones began working on unified messaging systems leading from Call-OS, USENET, WYLBUR, TSO, BITNET, DARPA, ARPA to modern (for its time) SMTP mail. That was then, and this is now. Email has become a zombie that doesn’t realize that it’s dead and falling apart, a vampire that sucks your life’s blood away slowly each night. You’ve probably noticed this yourself. Jones has put email behind him. In an attempt to atone for his part for inflicting email on UNC, he is exploring alternatives to email with a shotgun and a wooden stake (and Facebook, Twitter, Google+, etc.) as his tools. This talk with touch on the sad beginnings of email, offer some atonement for Jones’ part in the mess, and discuss trends and alternatives needed to achieve the Logic and Destiny of #noemail.

“Email Will Never Die” because we just change the definition

In an interview with Read Write Web, Ray Tomlinson, a principal engineer at BBN Technologies and the so-called “father of email” [if you ignore the earlier work of Tom Van Vleck and Noel Morris] recasts youth’s trending decline in email use by redefining email into something so broad that that word in his mind stands for any messaging system.

Soft rock is not rock and roll despite the presence of rock in the phrase; most of what Tomlinson is willing to call email is simply not that at all.

This is not to diminish Tomlinson’s accomplishment in some of email’s creation including the use of the @, but to say that email is not all electronic messaging. Email has a definition and a strong one that can keep Tomlinson’s good, if dated, work from vanishing into an undefinable mist of meaning.

Once again, Tomlinson confesses that email started on the wrong foot. No “Mr. Watson, come here — I want to see you.” moment. No “One small step for man.” But the first message was”one of a number of “entirely forgettable” test messages.” We now call that spam. A good part of the RWW article is dedicated to the legacy of spam and Tomlinson’s solution–strong identity requirements.

What is ignored is that we have identity in the form of white lists and friends lists that are part and parcel of social communications systems. Something similar exists in email systems but only in the most jerry-rigged sort of way.

New communications must be mobile, terse, highly interactive, allow for collaboration in an integrated fashion. That’s not email.

Email is over. It limps like a zombie looking for brains to devour. Its creator won’t acknowledge that fact even as pieces and parts of email fall on the bloody floor.

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