The irony is that making it possible to communicate with anyone at almost any time by any medium stops us from communicating with people standing right in front of us. It drives me crazy when colleagues will tail off mid conversation with me because something has come up on their PDA which couldn’t possibly wait a few hours – even if they don’t reply the social flow is broken because their attention is distracted whilst they digest the all-important message. Worse, I’ve even seen people do it in front of customers!!

Email and social media on the go are fantastic tools – enabling not only increased productivity but also in terms of a social good by freeing people up from being chained to their desk. You can take the kids to the doctor, work from home to look after children and not have to make the sacrifices that went with a career only 10 years ago. However, it is just as important to be able to switch off, to let the phone go to voicemail and not immediately answer that email – all credit to Alton Towers in their attempt to enforce it, it will be interesting to see what happens!

Luis Suarez of IBM has taken it a step further, and on 15th February gave up on work related email. The idea would be that he would refuse to respond or initiate email communication and would instead communicate via social networking tools such as those provided internally by IBM. If you read a little closer, he doesn’t completely give up on email, and recognises that for certain private conversations where sensitive information is exchanged, email is still a must. I see nothing wrong with this exception – no-one ever said email was fundamentally bad, just that it wasn’t always used for the right purpose. Also, I am guessing that Luis is internally facing, or that this applies to internal email only. I can’t really see a brand sales rep at IBM stopping using email to communicate with customers (although am happy to be proved wrong!)

Another interesting point is that he claims to receive, on a busy day, 30-45 emails. I personally think this is somewhat on the low side, I was always suspicious of people who claimed to go away for 5 days and come back to 2,000 unread emails (average of 400 per day), but I have certainly gone through periods of my life where 100 (on a busy day) was not unusual.

However, the results are still interesting, even if we take the case study as a low-volume email user who communicates mainly internally. It appears as if people took the hint and stopped sending Luis email. The results were most dramatic at the beginning, where the volume dropped from 35/day (175 per week) to 45 in the first week. The drop off has continued, but at a slower pace as shown here: