“In January I sent 22 emails,” admits Andy Swann in his very helpful and personal Medium post recounting his first month of #noemail.

Swann does a great job of pointing out his discoveries of helpful apps and practices (many of which you’ve seen on this blog, but his is a great update of what available at this point in time).

Interestingly the biggest bugaboo for Swann was his “out of office” aka “vacation” aka autoresponder in Outlook. It seems that Outlook wants some complex rules to avoid looping and over-responding. My own experience with GMail’s version was conversely completely simple and reliable and remains so. But do take Swann’s experience as a warning and keep an eye on your autoresponder actions even if you’re not quitting email.

One observation from Swann that readers of this blog will appreciate what Swann discovers:

I’ve come to rely on my phone as my complete communication hub now. I use native apps for everything and rarely use browser versions, or my laptop at all, if I can avoid it. The phone keeps all my communication methods together with instant access, notifications and updates.

Yes, the future of messaging will be: highly collaborative, mobile preferred, whitelisted, terse, quick, highly interactive, context appropriate, available to all devices, and with highly manageable and customizable communications streams

Swann touches on all of that and gives practical advice based on his recent personal experience. Check it out.

Andy Swann's Away Mesage