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This Friday November 27th, the 2nd edition of the ‘Email Free Friday‘ will happen in Belgium and the Netherlands.

On this Friday (private and business) users are asked to avoid using email. The idea is that your mailbox should not grab all your attention.
We all know that email is a very common communication channel in today’s life, as it’s free, fast, convenient to send an email.
We also know that reading emails can be a time consuming operation, and that sometimes (often) we have too many emails to read.

No emails on Friday, does this mean that we shouldn’t work ?
Of course no, but this is a good opportunity to change our work habits and try alternatives.

Here are a few ideas of things we can do instead of sending an email :

• use phone : really … I’m not kidding. Sometimes we send an email because it’s fast and easy, but in some case asking the question and/or answering to it would be much better by phone.
• use instant messaging : not available and allowed in all companies, but this is a good solution for quick and interactive discussions. At IBM we make an heavy use of Lotus Sametime, but MSN, Skype, Jabber might be valid alternatives (most of these tools are not appropriate to chat about confidential topics)
• get a coffee break : make a break and get a coffee with the person with whom you need to talk. This is a good and informal way of communicating
• use a RSS reader : try to replace newsletters by a RSS reader. This way you will avoid filling up your inbox with mails that very often we do not read. RSS readers should also be used to get updates / alerts from websites / blogs.
• blogs : instead of sending an email to many people asking them for ideas / feedback use Social softwares tools like blogs or wikis
• file sharing solutions : instead of sending a file via email, use a file sharing solution like Files from Lotus Connections

I’m sure some of you are curious about this, can we really use the tools and techniques listed above in a corporate environment ?
My answer is yes, these are some of the solutions that are used every day inside IBM to work and collaborate.

One of my colleague at IBM even pushed it further and decided that every day should be an ‘Email Free Day’.
About 2 years ago Luis Suarez found that dealing with his emails was taking too much time so he decided to change his way of working and collaborating.
Since the beginning of 2009 he has received an average of 21 emails a week, yes twenty-one and most of them are calendar/meeting invitations.
I’m sure a lot of people would like to have only 21 emails a week. How did he achieve that result ? He used the tools and techniques I listed above.
If you want to know more on how he did it you can listen to his interview by CBC’s host Nora Young in September this year.

Have a good Email Free Friday and feel free to share your experiences.

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image by http://www.flickr.com/photos/restlessglobetrotter/ / CC BY 2.0