In a previous post I discussed the possibilities to stop using e-mail within a corporate environment. There are a few persons that have been able to reduce their reliance on e-mail to an admirable low amount.
This article from Wired describes how Luis Suarez from IBM has been able to reduce his usage of e-mail to a cool 2 minutes per day!!! Although he has not been able to eradicate e-mail completely he is basically using it as an inbox only tool. Whenever possible he uses internal or external social tools to communicate with people. This has reduced his time required to communicate.
According to this article there are a few colleagues of Luis Suarez that also have taken the same direction. Juliana Leong, one of these people, says that by using social tools to answer questions, the number of questions to her have reduced because answers are accessible to everyone. Another effect of the openess was that questions are asked more through social tools which makes it possible for multiple people to answer a question. This can result in faster responses.
Encouraging to see that people are able to achieve this already in a corporate environment. At the same time the article also highlights that these people are still a minority. Hopefully they will get a bigger following in the near future!