What is there to say about life without e-mail? A lot more than you might think.
Does any of these sound familiar? “You’re in CC”, or “I’ll just send an e-mail”, or “It’s somewhere in my Inbox”, or “I send you that e-mail, didn’t you see it?”.
You never hear; “We had such a productive conversation via e-mail”, or “If you need that document, you can find it in my e-mail’, or “Of course I share my knowledge, everything is well organised and easily accessible via my Inbox”.
E-mail is much more often used as a thing to hide behind, an excuse; “Sorry, to busy, can’t do it, I have xxx e-mails to go through”, or people would much rather send an e-mail than to walk over and actually ask someone a question.
Luis Suarez
Our guest on this episode is none other that Mister “Life Without E-mail” himself, Luis Suarez. In the wonderful talk we have it comes to light that the idea of not using e-mail in the work place, or life in general, is much more than just not using a specific tool.
Luis is a front runner in the adoption of digital tools in the workplace for over 17 years. His current focus is about “Life Without E-mail”, but his efforts are much more broad, he’s a digital humanist pushing the digital transformation within companies whom truly want to change, and move into the 21st century.
Life Without E-mail
In the work place e-mail can be considered an intellectual black hole. It’s a place where knowledge goes to die.., to fade away, drift into myth and obscurity. It’s bad for business on so many levels. And here we just talk about using it for “sharing” and “storing” documents.
So much more in the workplace revolves around the use of e-mail; meetings, questions, information, memo’s… All these thing can be improved upon by not using e-mail.
In fact.., there are so many aspects that involve e-mail.., one could ask the question; Can you do your work without e-mail?
If the answer is ‘no’, then you might want to rethink the way you work. The bottom-line of e-mail is that is not a productivity tool, you do not create anything, you do not add anything to the collective.
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I am with customers today but cannot wait to hear my friend Luis share his impressive vision. So excited to see him here!
We’ll keep him on ice for you 🙂
I know Luis is frozen by now, but I need a couple more days… 🙂
Really enjoying the podcast – interesting strengths statement from Luis – stop focusing on the future, fix the now. Where Rogier has Futuristic as a strength, and actually does like peering over the horizon and communicating what that will feel like. My take is that we need both. Luis, so good to hear your voice, and love the confidence and clarity with which you speak. Also wonderful to hear Rogier’s and John’s awesome questions and insights. Great podcast.
Hiya, Maureen, what a lovely surprise seeing you listening to the podcast and sharing some wonderful insights above, as well! Many thanks for those!
I think you are spot on with that comment about focusing on the ‘Now’ and on the ‘(near) Future’. I think it’s the balance between the two that will definitely bring out some really great things. Alas, that’s not what we are seeing nowadays, specially, in a work environment. Everyone is just focusing on the ‘Future of Work’, because they know the present is just so messed and broken they don’t want to go down the rabbit hole of no return. And that is a bit of a problem, because unless we fix the present, i.e. the ‘Now of Work’, there won’t be a ‘Future of Work’ tomorrow and that’s very problematic on its own. why? Well, because we just can’t wait for tomorrow to arrive and fix all of our problems from today. We need to act now, if we would want to strike for that balance of present and future. And still survive as a species on this planet.
If you look into it, the future has always been that lovely utopian chimera that has been ingrained into our brains from an early age, generation after generation, simply because we needed something called ‘hope’ to have us hang in there for better times. Fast forward to 2015, have a quick look at the state of things around the world, and that hope seems to be up for a great battle, but where is the future? Is there anyone out there thinking about 2030, 2045, 2060? Like in the 70s and 80s we were told to believe about the 2000s and beyond? I don’t think so. Why? Because the pace of change has gone rampant, sky high through the roof in terms of complexity and since we are no longer capable of controlling that complex environment the problems started to become more obvious and apparent. And why we focus on the future of … vs. the present of… because we just can’t comprehend much of what’s going on anymore. ‘Present Shock’ by Douglas Rushkoff is a superb read on the topic, if I may add…
That’s why I’m not very much in favour of the ‘Future of Work’ body of work. Help us fix the ‘Present of Work’ and make it a better workplace today and we can then figure out what the future will hold tomorrow. But still tomorrow 😉