Grand experiment: Two years without email and going strong

Luis Suarez has been conducting a grand experiment, and is having a grand time with it.  That is, for more than two years now, he has been essentially living without corporate email. Well, almost. He reports that he still averages about 24 emails a week. That translates into a lot of productivity gained, he says.

"I’m just pretty excited that throughout these 45 weeks I have gone through without email at work I have been averaging around 24 emails per week. Yes, 24!! Which means that I have probably been spending around 50 minutes a week to process them all (Yes, 50 minutes a week!) and the rest of the time I have just been sharing knowledge and information (As well as collaborating across) in networked environments, i.e. social networks and communities."

Luis, who works for IBM, provides day-to-day progress reports on diminishing email volume on his Flickr account. (Just don't ask him to email you a copy, of course.)  And, as he tells us, he's relying on social networking venues to communicate with company and industry colleagues. He's an advocate of micro-blogging/sharing, for example, as a way to engage in real-time or asynchronous chats.

His motto: "Email is where knowledge goes to die."

Luis promises to provide a list of the main activities he engages in via social networking in the near future. In the meantime, he clues us in on his main social networking passtime: questions and answers. "The good old Q&A that every single knowledge worker engages with time and time again during the course of the week and, in most cases, several times a day." Quicker than doing a Q&A via email exchanges, right?

This post was originally published on Smartplanet.com