Comments on: Think outside the Inbox

By: Hacking the Good days… :: On Not Blogging

Hacking the Good days… :: On Not Blogging — Thu, 30 Oct 2008 15:06:13 +0000

[...] Suarez, the star of IBM social software branch, is known for his say-no-to-email initiative that inspired my last blog post. Although I get mixed feedbacks from you guys, it is hard to [...]

By: Mike Butcher

Mike Butcher — Tue, 28 Oct 2008 20:17:51 +0000

Hi Cathy could you email me please? thanks.

By: Thomas

Thomas — Wed, 01 Oct 2008 15:29:41 +0000

Don’t have time to write an interesting comment right now, but fortunately here’s several I made earlier -> http://bankervision.typepad.com/bankervision/2008/08/email-bankrupt.html#comments

By: Farhan Lalji

Farhan Lalji — Wed, 01 Oct 2008 14:15:24 +0000

I agree with Isofarro.

And I would add that a lot of it depends on network effects. If you can get those you work with to move to an “update the wiki” culture then you can move to an update the wiki mode. However if anyone you need to work with is still sending you emails your wiki remains your own thoughts.

By: Isofarro

Isofarro — Wed, 01 Oct 2008 12:49:13 +0000

Maybe it’s just my old age, but I can’t get my head around managing instant messaging knowledge. There doesn’t seem to be enough tools to extract important parts of IM conversations for easy lookup.

Email is starting to have the right sort of tools – tagging and smart filtering, but it’s still not good enough to filter the useful information into something manageable.

A wiki sounds like the obvious option, but so far it feels more like copy and paste, rather than a natural process.

The combination of tagging and exporting to a wiki does make some sense, but I don’t know whether such export functionality exists above and beyond a single email at a time.

My gut feel is that both email and IM should feed useful/flagged/important information into some sort of GTD system, and that GTD system should be a person’s main repository of information. A wiki can make a great GTD system, but its lowering the barrier to automatically getting content from email and IM into the wiki that makes this a burdensome task.

But its got to be a GTD system that can converse with email and IM systems, as well as being as available as possible, wherever in the world you are.

(I’ve prototyped one idea of how this can work. If only I had the time and impetus to flesh it out into what I think I need)