I briefly talked about this issue on my own blog and am expanding on it here. I finally met my long time virtual friend, Luis Suarez at the Enterprise 2.0 conference in Boston in June. He talked to me about getting rid of much of his email. A few days later I found out that he had an article on his adventures in the New York Times, I Freed Myself From E-Mail’s Grip. Here is more about it on his blog, Giving up on Work e-mail - Status Report on Weeks 15 to 20. Kudos to Luis. Here is Luis and myself at the Enterprise 2.0 conference when he told about his email liberation.

Luis wrote in the NYT article, “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.” Luis uses a lot of the IBM Connections tools that I recently covered in the App Gap (see Comprehensive Tour of Lotus Connections).

He said on his own blog that it was ironic for a good number of hours that his anti-email he published in the NYT was on the list of the Top 10 Most Popular e-mailed items. More importantly he added that he was not saying that email should be abolished. He is “just saying that it needs to be re-purposed and used for what it was meant to be in the first place: A communication tool for one on one conversations of a sensitive, private or confidential nature. The rest should be going out there, in the open, in the public space(s), transparent and with an opportunity for everyone to contribute! Notice that I am differentiating quite clearly between communication and collaboration, because they are not the same, no matter what people say about it!”

I could not agree more. Well done.

I have not been able to cut into email as much as Luis but I am offloading a lot of email around a small startup I am involved with by using GroupSwim, an online collaboration tool. It has taken out a lot of inefficient email threads as we discuss issues around our launch. However, I found myself at first needing to prod my partners to keep going back to the collaboration tool, instead of using the more familiar communication tool, email. Sometimes, I took their emails and posted them in the collaboration tool so we could more easily move beyond communication to collaboration and have an accessible record of this collaboration. Now they are getting more into using the tool and posting things themselves.  I think that everyone is starting to see the benefit. It will increase as we get more information and have to refer back to prior discussions.