Man cuts email use 80 percent in a week... but for what?

IBM's Luis Suarez got "tired" of answering email every morning, which he says sucked hours out of every day. Rather than moan about it and maybe install a plug-in to help him cope, Suarez did something drastic. He just stopped using email.

How does a guy that works at a place like IBM get away with "stopping" the use of email? Very carefully.

But seriously, there's something to this: Suarez has hit on the hard truth that email begets more email. Send one message and it can generate a chain of 20 responses, back and forth. If you don't believe me, check your Sent Items folder and see how much you correspond with the same people on the same topic, over and over again. (Also see how many of those emails consist of one word: "Thanks.") But if you stop the first message you stop all of them.

Suarez didn't just cut himself off from technology, though. Rather, he's replaced email with a number of other technologies that still allow him to communicate with others, namely social networking sites, instant messaging, blogging, and collaborative wikis. He's even turned to—gasp!—the telephone to get in touch with people.

If there's a flaw in Suarez's plan it's this one: Doesn't all that time spent blogging and IMing eat up just as much of the day as sending an email? Every morning my inbox is crushed with press releases, responses to questions, spam, and even those "Thanks!" notes... but dealing with them isn't that much of an onus. Most are simply deleted immediately. I can't imagine how much time Suarez must spend on his intricate "social bookmarking and tagging" system, nor do I really understand how IBM's home-grown Facebook-like social networking system actually helps get work done. The so-called "Beehive" system, says Suarez, helps "build trust levels with peers in order to get a job done much faster." That sounds great, but trust alone can't write and edit this blog post. (God, I wish it could!)

Bottom line for me: Sure, it may actually be easy to get rid of email, but consider what you're replacing it with. Would you rather spend two hours a day answering email messages, or spend that same amount of time composing 140-character blather on Twitter and editing a wiki? Is the cure worse than the disease?

LINK: I Freed Myself From E-Mail's Grip