“When we were doing research for our messaging product, we actually looked at what subject lines people used. And like 80 percent of subject lines are “hey,” “hi,” or left blank. The subject line is outdated. The truth is, e-mail is outdated.”
Though he’s IBM’s poster boy for dropping out of e-mail, even Suarez admits that the inbox and carbon-copy will probably never completely go away. But four years into his experiment, he feels more productive, and almost all of his work is done in the open.
For Suarez, it’s not just more efficient. It’s a nicer way to communicate. There’s a “Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy” kind of passive-aggressiveness to the way many people use corporate e-mail, with the strategic bcc and the cover-your-ass e-mail message. “If you have been using e-mail in a corporate environment, you know that plenty of people use e-mail as a weapon against their own colleagues,” he says. “This was also creating a new way of working where you wouldn’t need to justify the work you did. You earned trust from your colleagues by being a lot more public, a lot more open and a lot more transparent in what you do.”
