Content FeedAnyone who has used Lotus Connections for any length of time (be it at your own organisation, BleedYellow, Greenhouse or Paxos) will no doubt have had a play with Activities. These self-contained task- or event-centered workspaces are just perfect for allowing intra-team collaboration that does not depend on email. So many of those irritating scheduling or agenda-focused emails that go back and forth can be completely negated by storing the information in an activity and conversing, creating, modifying and removing content in an activity. I wholeheartedly recommend them.
As does Luis Suarez, certainly based on this latest update in his campaign to reduce his dependency on email:
Yes, indeed, I am talking about e-mails that are related to scheduling, setting up and participating in conference events, customer meetings / workshops, specially when it is to show my own experiences on this new reality itself. I am thinking that if I would be able to find a way to reduce those I would be getting my number of incoming e-mails down to 15 to 20 a week. If not less! Yes! As massive as that!!!
So that got me started into thinking about a way of getting rid of those e-mails and divert them elsewhere. And it wasn’t easy, to be honest. John Tropea (One of my favourite bloggers in the Knowledge Management, Collaboration, Communities, Social Computing & Librarian 2.0 spaces and surely one of those bloggers to add to your blogroll in case you haven’t done so already!) put together, not long ago, a pretty impressive blog post under "Examples of re-purposing e-mail" and he already provides some hints as to what I could be doing, but I will comment more on that blog post as time goes by. Too good to just mention it over here and definitely one that would be worth while exploring further into building a wiki space, putting together all of those different examples as a way of showing everyone else how they can start doing it in small, but steady steps.
John seems to be inclined to make use of Lotus Connections‘ Activities for the calendaring and scheduling coming through e-mails and I must confess that I have thought about it, too, myself, as well as a couple of other options. I have been thinking as well that a forum, with a discussion group (i.e. Newsgroup) may be another option, but kind of walked away from that idea since the IBM Forums I am exposed to cannot protect entries that may be of a sensitive nature. Then I thought that a wiki, with protected access where needed / required, may be another option to go by, but perhaps too difficult for other folks to engage with.
However, Connections’ Activities seems like it is an ideal way out for me. More than anything else because they can host both public and private events discussions. Also the fact that they are fully integrated into Lotus Notes 8 and Sametime 8 allowing everyone I may be working with to set up one of them and then send it over across to me, so that I can chime in and share a thought or two on the topic. And right there we could consolidate all e-mails exchanged thus far, IM chats involved as well as well as attaching the corresponding files as the final output of the event, and if there are any feedback forms collected after the event they could also be shared over there.
Thus here we go. I think that I am going to settle down for Connections’ Activities and start making use of them to walk away from e-mail one step further, as a way to arrange all of these different events and see if I got it right as to how further more I could reduce my weekly incoming e-mail count.
Oh, did I mention how you could collaboratively work together with other folks on the same activity? Let’s see how it goes from here… Stay tuned for further updates and see what happens in upcoming weeks! In future progress reports I am sure I will have an opportunity to share with you my experiences on them.
So, if like Luis, you want to reduce the number of emails that you send and receive, why not try out using Activities on a regular basis with your team colleagues and see whether it makes a real difference for you?
