The Evolution of Email

I first covered my friend Luis Suarez move away from email in 2008 – see Luis Suarez Frees Himself From E-Mail’s Grip and Much More. At the time Luis wrote in the article, Giving up on Work e-mail - Status Report on Weeks 15 to 20, “Instead of responding individually to messages that arrived in my in-box, I started to use more social networking tools, like instant messaging, blogs and wikis, among many others.” He added however, “I never gave up my work e-mail address, because I still need it for some work-related activities — for example, for one-on-one discussions that are too private and confidential to discuss publicly.”

This still holds as Luis recently talked with Kate Bassett about his take on life outside the inbox – see Thinking outside the inbox ‘improves team work’.  Luis sates that he is not trying to get rid of email although but to reduce its power over our lives.  Thus power can be oppressive. I saw a study that found half of respondents checking their email in bed, starting at around 7:09 AM and 68% check email before 8 AM. It also effects the evening as 38% at the dinner table. 69% can’t go to sleep without checking email and 40% do so after 10 PM.

The rise of social business can greatly reduce the use of email for things that are better address in the transparency of group collaboration. To facilitate the transition many of the vendors are integrating their tools with email. You can work within the email client and have content go directly into the social software for more efficiently distribution and comment. The reverse is also possible as content created with the social tool can be automatically sent out through email. See for example - Harmon.ie Provides Social Email to Push Enterprise Collaboration Adoption. 

These are all good trends. However, let’s hope we use the efficiency of the social tools and do not become slaves to them as many have done with Facebook. 

 

Comments

[Luis Suarez (@elsua)]

Hi Bill, great blog post and many thanks for the link love and for the insights! Indeed, that's the whole point of what I have been trying to demonstrate throughout all of these years since 2008 on how for group, networks, and community work there are much better tools, better suited, than traditional ones like email. In an exercise of openness, publicy and transparency it pays off to share your knowledge out there in the open with everyone. However, the key to this transition has also been to learn to adjust on new behaviours where you become part of the flow and, as such, there is no longer that demand on wanting to read everything and respond to everything. Never mind getting exposed to everything as a way to justify your work, which is one of the reasons why people still resort to email.

Basically, the generation of trust by narrating your work (Observable Work #owork) has been paying off tremendously throughout all of that time and if there is anything that I would share as a word of caution is that innate sense of "oversharing" that we seem to be going through in social networking tools. Just because we want to show we are there and everything. Well, I keep saying, we already know! No need for you to overstate it 50 or 60 times per day!! Tame yourself, just like you keep trying to tame the email beast. But it's got to start somewhere! :)

Thanks again for the lovely post and hope to see you soon again!

[bill Ives]

Luis - Thanks for your comments. I am working on a project now where we use a wiki and Skype as the main forms. We often screen share the wiki as part of our conversations. It is so much better than email and attachments. In addition to using email less because of tools like a wiki, I am also using it less because of real time tools like Skype. Bill

[Luis Suarez (@elsua)]

You are most welcome, Bill! Absolutely! And this is where it gets really really cool, because it proves how collaboration, knowledge sharing and productivity tools have been designed to do a better job in group collaboration than what email does... And being able to get together in real-time is just as good as it gets in combination with offline. Which is also one of the main reasons why I *heart* Google Plus quite a bit since it integrates both of those aspects of collaboration without having your information being snooped around, like I found out the other day with Skype ... Oh oh ... bad, bad, bad boy, that Skype one! :)

[bill Ives]

Luis - See you at KM World in October. Looking forward to it.

[Luis Suarez (@elsua)]

Hi Bill! Absolutely! I am already looking forward to it since it would be the first time I will be going there and looking at the list of speakers there are a bunch of folks that I haven't seen in years F2F and it would be good to reconnect again, along with seeing great friends again, as yourself! See you soon!!