Accept no substitutes

Category: #noemail (Page 5 of 10)

Toward #noemail for the less Ruthless

Big Fish: A Novel of Mythic Proportions

I recommend just quitting email, but that’s not for everyone. This morning three articles hit the net with observations and recommendations about how to manage your email so that it doesn’t manage you.

First, Matt Gemmell tries to give advice about “Managing Your Email Realistically.” I like most all of Matt’s advice, but he doesn’t go far enough. Email is to be used only sparingly says Matt, which is as we say in the South “a very nice idea” meaning that no one can actually pull that kinda thing off. Example: “If John would just lay off the bourbon, he’d be a top notch lawyer.” Answer: “That’s a very nice idea.”
That said, if you must use email then following Matt’s suggestions is a very nice idea.

Second, Jason B Jones (no known relation to me) aka ProfHacker writes for academics who are swamped by email in The Chronicle of Higher Education, “You’ve Got Mail. And Better Things to Do.” ProfHacker and Matt have been reading the same listserv as near as I can tell. ProfHacker offers similar if not the same suggestions with a twist toward the academic environment. The article is full of very nice ideas which only a superhuman could actualize as a daily practice. I don’t mean to say that turning off notifications and prioritizing are bad ideas, again they are very nice ideas. I do mean that why take the effort when you can drop email all together and be more effective, more collaborative and much much happier.

Third of the day and it’s just noonish, the BIGfish blog — not to be confused with the novel of mythic proportions by Daniel Wallace or the movie directed by Tim Burton based on that novel — quotes the penultimate authority on #noemail, yours truly, in a post on “The Future of Email Marketing”
I equivocate a little which will amuse regular readers of #noemail as I say:

“Will email die? That would be too much for me to hope for. Not so much die as morph into a better messaging platform or platforms that are mobile, faster, concise, and personal.”

Fear not, true believers. I also say, “Email marketing was a great idea in the 20th century.” Perhaps I should have said “A very nice idea.”

Traveling with #noemail

We recently took a tour of London and the Balkans (Croatia, Serbia, Bulgaria and Istanbul). Five countries with five currencies and none on the Euro. Thank g*d for ATMs. And several different airlines (United, EasyJet, Croatian, JAT, Turkish, Luftansa) plus buses.

TripIt logoHow to manage all of that without email? First I admit I used my wife’s email as a backup. But the real win for reducing email and going to achieve #noemail is using TripIt.com and their great mailbox scanning feature.

I’ve used TripIt for years and found that it makes setting up and dealing with your itinerary almost painless.
In the past, you simply forwarded your email to TripIt and the invisible monkeys transformed all that information from the airlines, hotels, etc into your itinerary automagically. You can then edit and add the non-mail driven bits — in our case buses, home stay addresses, sites visits that we needed to schedule, etc.

Now you need not even forward the email. TripIt can and will with your permission scan your Gmail box and the monkeys get to work without you even asking them. Pow you have an itinerary without even reading mail.

And this serves as a good answer to the needling question: Isn’t someone reading your email for you? You can answer: If my email is related to my travels, it’s read and acted on by the invisible monkeys at TripIt.

While I’ve written only about email scanning, TripIt has many other great features including maps, directions, expense tracking, and automatic calendar integration. Explore, it’s worth your travel time.

Disclosure: I have no relationship with TripIt other than as a satisfied client. I have never met someone I know to be a TripIt employee or investor.

Catching up with #noemail

We’ve had a busy past few months from end of semester to a summer seminar in London followed by a trip around the Balkans: Croatia > Serbia > Istanbul > Bulgaria > Serbia. It’s time to do a little catch up on the state of #noemail.

* Whilst in London, we met up with pioneer #noemail er Luis Suarez aka @elsua. Besides visiting his favorite dim sum shop, Luis offered some insight into his first steps away from email.

Luis realized that while email was touted as a way to increase cooperation and comradely interactions that it was largely being used as a way to CC higher ups on discussions in ways that actually put a damper on cooperation and decrease trusted interactions — and of course filled up everyone’s mailboxes with unnecessary reports and discussions. Team members spent more time looking over their shoulders than acting like a team as managers were flooded with with chitchat. No one was winning and most people were frustrated by the overload.

* I offered a couple of my own insights — later tweeted into the #noemail stream:

  • When the Buddha said you should avoid attachments, I’m sure he was referring to email and PDFs
  • Email is like a bunch of squirrels. Cute & amusing at first then timewasting, destructive, overmultiplying, & finally *evil*

Friends have been keeping me up on new #noemail articles:

* Joe Bob Hester sends: How useless is email? Two new studies weigh in http://gigaom.com/collaboration/how-useless-is-email-two-new-studies-weigh-in/ which leads us to a GigaOM piece what plays down the kind of gossip and small talk that builds social bonding. Yes there is a lot of that in email, but there it’s annoying and almost not work the cost. Unlike, say, the News Feed on Facebook or a Tweet stream both of which are designed, well-designed, for skimming and sharing in a small talk and social way. What in email is weighed toward being a time sink are positives in more social environments.

* Paul Valach alerts us to a new Pew Internet report: Teens love texting and social networks but ignore e-mail http://pewinternet.org/Commentary/2012/April/Pew-Internet-Teens.aspx
This builds on reports and studies referenced earlier on this blog and by Pew itself. Amongst the interesting numbers are:

35% of all teens socialize with others in person outside of school on a daily basis.
29% of all teens exchange messages daily through social network sites.
22% of teens use instant messaging daily to talk to others.
19% of teens talk on landlines with people in their lives daily.
6% of teens exchange email daily.

Teens would rather use a land line than send email!

But Texting is the dominant daily teen communication channel. “Texting dominates teens’ general communication choices. Overall, 75% of all teens text, and 63% say that they use text to communicate with others every day.”

* Don Sizemore tells us of the need to redesign email using a “new protocol [that] should be a todo list” in a ReTweet from @hackernewsbot on Replacing Emailhttp://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4228402. I think the hackers miss the point. There are a lot of communications protocol and even print drivers that we’ve dropped and reconceived over the years. The whole concept of email should be dropped and reinvented.

* Stacey Devine was the first to alert me to this New York Times article “Disruptions: Life’sToo Short for So Much E-Mail” by Nick Bilton http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/07/08/life%E2%80%99s-too-short-for-so-much-e-mail/. Nick notes most of the same points raised in this blog about email — and he even comes to similar conclusions:

Since technology hasn’t solved the problem it has created with e-mail, it looks as if some younger people might come up with their own answer — not to use e-mail at all.

So I’m taking a cue from them.

I’ll look at my e-mail as it comes in. Maybe I’ll respond with a text, Google Chat, Twitter or Facebook message. But chances are, as with many messages sent via Facebook or Twitter, I won’t need to respond at all

UnifiedInBox lets us know of Rachel Woodlock’s post on “Experimenting with managing email overload (or how to ease into #noemail)” which includes disposable customized email addresses for mailing lists aka bizSpam and discouraging .vacation messages and autoresponders. http://www.rachelwoodlock.com/2012/06/experimenting-with-managing-email-overload-or-how-to-ease-into-noemail/ Good ideas and suggestions here from Rachel.

* Luis Suarez and Chris Brogan and others like John Cox’s notes on his “Vacation from Email” http://associationnavigator.com/2012/07/02/take-a-vacation-from-email/ which is really an essay on work life balance. Log off and live. Nice work if you can get it.

* Beth McNichol of the Carolina Alumni Review did a bang up job writing on a tough subject – me — in “Geek Poet Strikes Back” http://www.carolinaalumnireview.com/carolinaalumnireview/20120506/?pg=18#pg18. Lots of my person story as relates to #noemail there. Recommended.

[more to be added as I catch up]

Wired for Success? Go #noemail says Psychology Today’s Ray Williams

Ray Williams, columnist for Psychology Today and author of “Breaking Bad Habits,” suggest that you break your email habits and go #noemail. In “Is It Time to Ban Emails Because They Reduce Productivity?” Williams answers his title question YES as he rehearses, with citations, much of the most recent thinking including those who say you just can’t about email.

He concludes:

One thing is certain, the volume of emails, and reliance on them as the preferred form of communication in organizations is becoming more acute and dysfunctional, and information overload is now the number one problem in organizations.

He invented the email attachment – #noemail

Nathaniel Borenstein. Photograph: Christian Sinibaldi for the GuardianIt must have seemed like a good idea at the time. In 1993, Nathaniel Borenstein sent the first MIME (Multipurpose Internet Mail Extension) encoded attachment. It wasn’t the picture that he had invented MIME to deliver — that would come later much later 19 years later (according to an interview with the Guardian) — it was a photograph and a recording of Borenstein’s barbershop quartet the Telephone Cords singing “Let Me Call You Sweetheart.”

Today people waste tons of bandwidth sending, as Borenstein did, 100s of such images at a time to their networks for friends. Each message going into a silo where it is quickly forgotten and not communally shared. Comments about the images, sound or other attached media are either lost or over shared. Receivers are at once delighted and annoyed but the clumsiness of attachments and how their email reader handles those attachments.

Attachments remain the worst way to collaborate. Still, it seemed like at least a half good idea at the time. (Borenstein admits what he feels are other failings of attachments including the term “attachment” itself in the Guardian article).

Today things have changed. Attachments should be like horse shoes, repurposed for use in an entirely different game or merely posted on the doorway as an amusement.

As Borenstein himself notes: “The second of [Buddhism’s] Four Noble Truths tells us that the cause of all suffering is attachments”

#noemail – interesting forthcoming paper – “A Pace Not Dictated by Electrons”: An Empirical Study of Work Without Email

“A Pace Not Dictated by Electrons”: An Empirical Study of Work Without Email

Mark, G.J., Voida, S. & Cardello, A.V. (to appear). “A Pace Not Dictated by Electrons”: An Empirical Study of Work Without Email. To appear in Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI 2012), Austin, Texas, May 5–10. ACM Press.

Abstract
We report on an empirical study where we cut off email usage for five workdays for 13 information workers in an organization. We employed both quantitative measures such as computer log data and ethnographic methods to compare a baseline condition (normal email usage) with our experimental manipulation (email cutoff). Our results show that without email, people multitasked less and had a longer task focus, as measured by a lower frequency of shifting between windows and a longer duration of time spent working in each computer window. Further, we directly measured stress using wearable heart rate monitors and found that stress, as measured by heart rate variability, was lower without email. Interview data were consistent with our quantitative measures, as participants reported being able to focus more on their tasks. We discuss the implications for managing email better in organizations.

On the 6th Month of #noemail 12 People Sent to Me

November was my 6th month of #noemail and people have learned well how to reach me by means other than email. I think my “vacation” message offering the many alternatives to email helped a lot on this front. As you will see from my deep analysis of the 12 Gmail Priority Messages that I received, no one wrote me angry messages or felt the need to explain to me why I must use email (save one sender).

I divide email-ers into four categories:

  1. evil robots – These send the most email by volume and the least useful email. We call them “spammers” as does Gmail which generally does a great job of dumping these complete time wasters into the Spam Folder. And my favorite email to hate — email that responds to my vacation message with “WARNING This is a Send Only Account” — and one most often that escapes the Spam Filter. Nonetheless, occasionally email that mattered (to me in the past) would end up in the Spam Folder causing me to look into this garbage pail. Of my — and of most others — mail, this amounted 90% of the mail received.
  2. well-meaning robots – Listservs that you always meant to read or forgotten that you subscribed to, Offers from sites you forgot to opt out of, Political messages that were important in some contexts, Alerts telling you about what you just ordered, Alerts about shipping dates for what you just ordered, Confirmations, Reminders of things you wish you could forget, More special offers that you might possibly want some day. These are usually in the non-Priority Inbox in Gmail — again Gmail is very helpful this way — and amount to about 80% of the non-Spam/non-evil robot email.
  3. well-meaning people – They think about 20 plus of their pals want attachments about their family, about fake church signs, about their political causes, about Groupon, about the last message they sent (as in “I want to make sure everyone got this. Some folks email programs blocked it last time”). They want to set up a meeting (I refer them to Gcalendar in my “vacation” message). They have Replied All to some one else’s message inappropriately. They want to collaboratively edit a document (It’s attached. It’s in an ancient version of Word. Or if from a lawyer friend in WordPerfect. Or worse in one case in the past 6 months — a PDF!); I refer them to Gdocs for this. Do not send attachments. Period. No excuses. No Exceptions. Share your pictures on Flickr, Smugmug, Picasa, or Facebook, please.

    Arranging meetings deserves a paragraph of its own. A committee of a dozen people doesn’t need to “send your available dates to the list and be sure to ReplyAll;” we should learn to use Doodle and we’ll all be happier and more efficient. Sign up. Check off your availability. Set the date for the meeting. Done. #noemail needed.

    Overall, well meaning people’s messages account for about 98% of the email not sent by robots.

  4. Real messages from real people with real requirements – I received 12 emails during the month of November that qualified as “Real messages from real people with real requirements.” Of those half solved their problem or concern themselves within a few hours of sending the message and didn’t follow up with any of the alternative suggestions from my vacation responder. Three almost immediately contacted me by Twitter or Facebook or LinkedIn or Google+. One called me on my phone.

    Two were from a friend in a higher level administrative postion who also sent me Facebook messages to tell me that he had sent me email. We are still friends — so far. (I know you are taunting me, but I resist even naming you here).

Most regular correspondents have already migrated to #noemail solutions.

Final tally. About 100 non-Spam emails/day. About 20 of those per day were from well-meaning people. And of the 3,000 non-Spam emails received in November, 0.4% were Priority and from real people with real requirements. Or about 3 per week.

Happy #noemail New Year.

Thanks to Rebecca Radish who sends, via Twitter, a link to this NPR story, “Analyze This: You Wrote How Many Emails This Year?” The sweet little app requires Gmail but promises interesting results and insights to those who dare look at their own email habits.

Felix Salmon writing for Reuters in an article just published as “How social networks beat email” reports:

My work email account, in particular, is a nightmare: it’s 95% unsolicited PR pitches and 4% internal emails going out to enormous distribution lists which I have no interest in at all. Which means I have to go to a lot of effort to find the 1% of emails that I actually want to read. There’s got to be a better way.

Steve Gillmor Remembers email in a time of #noemail

Steve Gillmor of Gillmor Gang writes in TechCrunch about “Remembering Email” which is much like remembering the magic of Top 40 Radio or maybe the first clear FM stations. Steve notes that notifications have taken over his attention and ours, but even more the attention of our kids.
Readers of this blog won’t be surprised by this. Short, fast, highly interactive, mobile. That’s the future of messaging. And that ain’t email. And in case, you haven’t noticed that ain’t even voice anymore. Kids text more than voice and more than email. Many of us older folks do as well. The trend lines are set and the practices of business are changing (again see this blog).
Email puts knowledge in siloed inboxes; social (as Luis Suarez has been saying) makes knowledge more open, additive and makes us all richer. The business case, at least internally, is clear.
Steve notices that email serves most often as the default way to notify us of social updates. But, as he also notices, the new robust iOS notifications do a much better job. Those changes sent many folks running to shut off email notifications and get the notification clutter out of the inbox and on the palm top where they are Short, fast, highly interactive, mobile
Steve has additional observations about authority, command and control, sharing, and even the privacy of direct messages.
All good. Email contains the seeds of its own destruction. “The reason email will disappear is because it is the single most effective tool for moving to social.” Once that bridge is effectively crossed, we’ll burn it behind us.

Thierry Breton’s got some ‘splainin’ to do — so he does #noemail

Atos world headquarters
Atos SA CEO Thierry Breton really opened the #noemail discussion to a wider audience with his announcement that Atos, one of the world’s largest technology companies, would put an end to internal email within 18 months. Perhaps the most amazing thing about the Press Release is that it is dated February 7, 2011 and is just this week making news and getting reactions. Less surprising is that the report is fairly clear and terse and to the point — yet, the interpretation of that release has been uniformly misread, misunderstood, and misreported.

Here’s the gist in a quote from the release:

In line with [Atos Origin]’s Wellbeing at Work Programme launched in 2009 to support its goal of being one of the best places to work, [Atos] has implemented a number of initiatives to improve communication and information sharing across its organization For example, it is encouraging the use of tools such as Office Communicator and has set up social community platforms to share and keep track of ideas on subjects from innovation and Lean Management through to sales. Initial feedback is that these type of tools reduce email by between 10 and 20% immediately.

Information overload – the facts:

  • By 2013, more than half of all new digital content will be the result of updates to, and editing of existing information
  • Online social networking is now more popular than email and search
  • Middle managers spend more than 25% of their time searching for information
  • 2010 : Corporate users receive 200 mails per day, 18% of which is spam

So far so good. But after a panic and overreaction this past week, Thierry Breton was on BBC explaining the program largely by quoting or restating the same information that can be found in the February 2011 press release.

One thing not much noticed in the US press is that the driver for #noemail isn’t a capricious decision by Breton, but a suggestion from an employee-run study group. The company is made up of young people and getting younger as it grows. As studies cited earlier in this blog show, the kids don’t get email. Especially clunkers like Outlook.

This is part of a global initiative that we initiated in ATOS almost three years ago called “Wellbeing At Work” – a knowledge network made up of new talents in the company.

Their mission, in addition to their normal job, is to provide new ideas to enhance working conditions.

They put on the table the fact that most of the young people that we were hiring were not using email anymore after graduating from universities.

They were instead mainly using instant messaging tools and social networks like Facebook – and for most of them, when they joined Atos it was first time they had ever worked with internal email tools like [Microsoft] Outlook.

One note of clarity and of amusement: Breton supports external email (clarifying part). His email as posted on his bio page is more-info@atos.net a generic company email addy.

Room For Debate: Should Workplaces Curtail E-Mail? #noemail

Much of the media is jazzed about Thierry Breton’s decision to end corporate email within Atos SA in the next 18 months. Can he do it? Is he sane? What will come of it if it does work? And hey, we did that already ourselves.

In this last camp are: Klick in INC’s “The Company That Outlawed Email”, BonitaSoft in GigaOM as Email in the enterprise: entering its twilight at 40? and How We Killed Email: To Save Time and Sanity. The second by BonitaSoft CEO Miguel Valdes Faura and third by Josh Smith of GotToBeMobile and Notebooks offer suggestions for alternatives and productivity enhancers that would be quite helpful to anyone embarking on a corporate #noemail campaign.

Joe Mortis - #noemail

The New York Times catches the #noemail wave in their Room for Debate blog with the cleverly rhymed “Should Workplaces Curtail E-Mail?”. Here four experts or at least four people with vested opinions write short provocative essays to give rise to a spirited discussion or just troll for responses. Email or #noemail experts offered are:

Nicholas G. Carr author of “The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains” and a lecturer on no email and no social networking who uses underdeveloped brain research to argue that Google/Internet/email makes us stupid(er). In his piece “Put the Cost Back in Communication,” Carr argues predictably that distractions — email and social media make you stupid(er).

William Powers, the author of “Hamlet’s BlackBerry: Building a Good Life in the Digital Age,” has a twitter handle @HamletsBB. He’s not worried about his brain changing — he can quote Plato still — but he is concerned that we need both connectedness and disconnectedness. A basic “let’s use technology appropriately” argument. How could that go wrong? In some ways, it’s Nicholas Carr lite. In his essay, “The Phony ‘Zero E-Mail’ Alarm,” Power praises connectedness and warns of overload citing Jonathan Spira’s “Overload! How Too Much Information is Hazardous to Your Organization” for support. Finally, Power suggests that we meet Face to Face. In full disclosure, I can say that I’m closest to Power’s position (so far).

Peggy Duncan, an Atlanta-based personal productivity expert and Outlook consultant, and the author of “Conquer Email Overload with Better Habits, Etiquette and Outlook 2007” thinks the technology is just fine. People need to change. It’s so simple. Their brains aren’t changing, but they should be changed. People should follow the rules and suggestions in her book. Or hire her as a consultant. Get rid of face to face; let employees “meet with their in inboxes instead.” Peggy, you had me at Outlook. Srzly?

That leaves us with my ole pal and #noemail pioneer Luis Suarez aka @elsua. Luis as readers of this blog know is a social computing evangelist at IBM, helping to accelerate the adoption of social networking tools as business tools. And Luis has been off corporate email and on social media solutions since 2008. You might expect that Luis would make a strong case for #noemail. But you would be wrong. Luis instead cautions against being too rash or too quick to kick out email in his essay “What We Would Miss.” As much as I respect Luis, I feel he is too moderate in his message especially given that this is a debate. True that Carr and Power aren’t taking the side of email at all. But neither are they exactly on the side of the move to social media. Luis and I have long had a disagreement about email as the best way for a private interchange (he says it is and I say you gotta be kidding, DM or SMS or other messaging is better for this) and to schedule meetings (he says it is and I say you gotta be kidding, use a shared calendar or Doodle.com).

Unlike the other authors, Luis responds to every comment that is at least half sane. Props to Luis! He is social. He is doing the work. He is not even selling a book. As a result, Luis’ thread is by far the best read of the debate. Social rules! Especially when lead by and experienced social media communicator.

LOLing and Leaving #noemail

While some like Observer (UK) writer John Naughton are LOLing over Mark Zuckerberg’s observation that email is dead,” others, like Atos SA (Europe’s Largest IT Company) CEO Theirry Breton are kicking email out of their companies.
Thierry Breton - Credits:  France Télécom
Breton’s pronouncements got ink (err electrons too) in Wall Street Journal and The Telegraph (UK) yesterday before getting the hyperactive Slashdot treatment. today. Among the firebombs tossed by Breton were:

“The email is no longer the appropriate (communication) tool. The deluge of information will be one of the most important problems a company will have to face (in the future). It is time to think differently.”

“Companies must prepare for the new wave of usage and behaviour”

Obvious statements to folks reading this blog or who have since shutoff email themselves.

Not that everyone agrees. Dudley Dawson at examiner.com composed a long whine about Breton including a critic of his English (or of the translator’s version of Breton. I await to read with some anticipated glee Dawson’s French postings.) Dawson raises many points, misfiring on each and misinterpreting all while missing the main point — collaboration and social are less served by email.

But with Atos and IBM both pushing for #noemail workplaces, Naughton’s claim that “[T]he main reason young people don’t use email is that they haven’t yet joined the world of work” becomes more empty and obviously reactionary and tired. Work at great companies isn’t about getting stuck in unproductive technologies but about pressing forward to a more efficient and productive future — without email.

BBC: Social Media vs Email = He said, she said #noemail

A recent BBC article, Clash of the titans: Email v social media by Fiona Graham (Nov 25, 2011) falls solidly and flatly in the “He said, she said” camp of reporting.

Ping ponging back and forth between experts on social media — Zuckerberg is pictured with his vision of better messaging’s somewhat redundant six points — informal, immediate, personal, simple, minimal and short — Graham recounts very briefly the history of email name-checking @ sign promulgator Ray Tomlinson in the process.

Overdue attention is given to MIME creator Nathaniel Borenstein. Borenstein notes that email use continues to grow and rues the slow uptake that IBM’s LotusLive has seen. Graham notes that until recently Borenstein was an IBM employees working on LotusLive. Borenstein became chief scientist at email management company, Mimecast, in June 2010

Who speaks for social? Lee Bryant, co-founder of Headshift, the world’s biggest social business consultancy (according to Graham). I wonder what he will say. “He believes email’s dominance over business communications is coming to an end.” Since he’s based his business on this, I guess so.

But setting the snark aside for a paragraph or two, I agree with Bryant as he opines:
I think we’ve reached the stage where email as means of communicating is overloaded. I think we will see what happens on email today transitioning towards various kinds of both internal and consumer facing social tools.”

For a finale, Graham turns to Dave Coplin, head of Microsoft’s Envisioneers team. The guy who works for a company heavily invested in email solutions — Outlook, Exchange and HotMail — and famously unsuccessful at anything social can’t find anything wrong with email. Social media is just a “shiny new penny.” The Envisoneer is no Imagineer. He cannot speak publicly in a way that would disrupt his company. He does in the course of the discussion utter a keen observation: “I think that email is dead when it comes to social media in the same way that snail mail was dead when it came to email.”

Perhaps he’s still writing letters in the way we wrote them in 1960 or sending postcards as frequently. Maybe he hasn’t noticed that the USPS is seeing a precipitous drop in first class mail usage. Heck, we don’t even get billed on paper any more. Yes, I agree with the Softie: snail mail is diminished and fading like AM radio. Email will soon follow.

Look ma, #noemail !: blogs and IRC as primary and preferred communication tools in a distributed firm.

Aditya Johri. (Virginia Tech, Blacksburg, VA, USA)
Look ma, #noemail !: blogs and IRC as primary and preferred communication tools in a distributed firm. CSCW ’11 – Proceedings of the ACM 2011 conference on Computer supported cooperative work. Pages 305-308.

Abstract

Email has been the primary communication medium in organizations for decades and despite studies that demonstrate its obvious disadvantages, the prevailing thinking is that email is irreplaceable. In this paper I challenge that view through a field study of a distributed firm that is highly successful in developing and delivering products without regular use of email in the workplace. Group blogging and IRC were the primary tools used and they allowed improved coordination and knowledge sharing compared to email. This paper contributes to scant literature in CSCW on firm-level technology use.

#noemail in US News & World Report Inside Education

US News Best Colleges

Menachen Wecker’s article “5 Tips for Managing Your Campus E-mail: Students can use a variety of techniques, including filtering, creating folders, and flagging spam” begins:

If you E-mail Paul Jones, you will receive an auto-response explaining why the journalism professor at University of North Carolina—Chapel Hill (UNC) quit using E-mail on June 1, 2011—and why there must be a better way to communicate.

In a phone interview, Jones says he stopped E-mailing because his inbox was clogged by computer-generated spam.

“When I started using E-mail 25 years ago, I sent mail to people, and people sent mail to me,” he says. “Now Amazon sends me mail telling me I just ordered a book. I know I just ordered a book, you idiot, I still have the browser open!”

Some recent research suggests that college students may increasingly share Jones’s view of E-mail as “a complete time sink.” A 2010 Pew Internet report finds that 11 percent of 12-to-17-year-olds exchange daily E-mails with friends, and 54 percent text message daily. A white paper released in early 2011 by the Internet marketing research company, comScore, charts a 59 percent decline in E-mail use by 12-to-17-year-olds in 2010.

But according to the recently released National Study of Undergraduate Students and Information Technology, which surveyed 3,000 students at 1,179 colleges and universities, 39 percent of respondents wish their professors used E-mail more often, and 75 percent send or receive an average of 25 E-mails a day.

In the course of the article, I offer more advice about managing email in college including: Don’t use it, Let others read it instead, and Unsubscribe from every listserv that you can possibly unsubscribe to. Read. Enjoy. Learn. Do.

Social uber email in Business by Carolyn, Luis, Luis, and Louis – 3 stories of #noemail

Private social networks playing Facebook role in more workplaces (Carolyn Duffy Marsan. Network World, October 20, 2011)

In the last 18 months, hundreds of thousands of companies have signed up for private cloud-based social networking services such as Yammer, Chatter, Huddle and Jive — all of which are modeled after Facebook.

Today, millions of U.S. workers are using these social networking services on the job instead of e-mail, Intranet sites, wikis, blogs or other collaboration software. CIOs are reporting significant returns on their investments in these services, which cost $5 or less per user, per month.

“Social networking is really powerful because it allows people to have real conversations with each other, and it’s unfiltered,” says Chris Laping, CIO of the Denver-based Red Robin Gourmet Burger chain and a Yammer user. “It’s a great way for me to get a pulse check on the topics that people are talking about in the regions, whether it’s labor costs or food costs. …There isn’t a week that goes by that I don’t see some conversation on Yammer that I don’t think: ‘Wow, that’s interesting.'”

Email Driving Your Business Crazy? Dump It and Embrace Social Software! (Socialize Me. Luis Benitez. October 20, 2011)

A lot of my colleagues express amusement when I tell them that I’ve been able to reduce my inbox from 100+ emails/day to ~20 emails/day. The first question they always ask is: “How did you do it?”

It wasn’t easy and it has taken time, but I was motivated by Luis Suarez. Luis was was interviewed by Leo Laporte and Amber MacArthur in their Net@Night show last year and is living the dream: a world without email. It was one of Luis’ webinars that introduced me to the concept of moving away from email and embracing social software.

Luis Benitez includes a SlideShare from IBM’s Louis Richardson:

Benitez also includes this terse but useful summary of Richardson’s presentation:

Richardson summarizes why a business should embrace social software over email:

Open the conversation, leverage the wisdom of the crowds
Use networks and communities to target the conversation
Easily capture intellectual capital and avoid re-inventing the wheel
And most of all: It’s Easy. Low Impact. High Value!

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