Luis Suarez, who works for IBM from the Canary Islands, got tired of wading through piles of e-mail, so he moved most of his communications to social networking tools, especially blogs. To keep up with his co-workers, he used an RSS reader (I use Google Reader for the same thing) to stay on top of their blogs.

Lawyers can make use of social networking tools, as well. A litigation team could make extremely effective use of a blog to track ideas, due dates, documents, and more. It would need to be a non-public blog, obviously, but this would be easy to accomplish.

One of the problems with e-mail is it is sent, received, and then lost. If team members communicated on a blog, that information would be constantly available and frequently reviewed.

I Freed Myself From E-Mail’s Grip | New York Times

I sat on a panel with productivity guru Merlin Mann today. We talked about a range of issues, from information overload to paperlessness to Getting Things Done and the Franklin-Covey method, all with reference to the life of lawyers.

If you are not familiar with Merlin Mann, check out the video below, “Inbox Zero,” which changed my e-mail life.

Beer companies sell illusions, not beer. They convince us that we will be smarter, more attractive, suave, etc., if we drink the beer. It rarely works. A screen-tanned blogger chugging Coors Light is no more attractive than a screen-tanned blogger without the beer. More tipsy, though.

Similarly, office supply companies sell us on the illusion that if we just had their neat product, we would be organized! Take the Chronotebook, one of the winners of last year’s Muji Awards.

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From Unclutterer comes a great post by Zen Habits author Leo Babauta on creating a minimalist workspace. Most of the attorneys I know life among piles of paper. While some defend their “system” of “organization,” most just don’t seem to know how to escape from the paper jungle they created for themselves.

So the first step is for you to consider your requirements for working, and what’s essential to your workflow. If possible, streamline and simplify that workflow and those requirements. Then, once you’ve got that down to a minimum, see what the minimum setup would be for those essentials and your workflow. Eliminate everything unnecessary.

. . .

It’s interesting to note that what you think your requirements are might not be the minimum. They might just be what you’re used to doing.

[photo: Zen Habits]

Today I had a revelation: software, as good as some of it is, doesn’t have much to do with productivity, which is the fruit of organization. Software allows implementation of systems, which are where organization lives.

I have been dual-booting Ubuntu Linux and Windows XP Pro, thinking about Web 2.0 and XML, and learning about Getting Things Done (GTD). And in the process, really thinking a lot about how I store, manipulate, and use data.

And I realized that as much as I like Outlook, I can do the same thing in Gmail/GCal, Thunderbird with Lightning, Time Matters, or a stack of index cards. Likewise, Word is great, but all you really need is Notepad. I’m not into full-on GTD, but I understand the concept, which I arrived at in my own way in my quest to free myself from platform-dependence and complex solutions to simple problems.

So if the key to productivity is organization, what is the key to organization? A trusted system to store to-dos, appointments, ideas, etc. That’s a very GTD thing to say. But what should your system be? Whatever works for you. A stack of index cards, Outlook, a Palm, a moleskine, or whatever you need to keep track of information and projects and free your mind to do work, not think about work.

In the midst of my musings, I realized that anything that ties me to one way of doing things–whether that is Outlook keeping me in Windows or a notepad I could lose–is dangerous. The key is to free the junk floating around in our heads as much as possible. That is what I was doing when I switched from POP to IMAP for e-mail, freeing myself from any one operating system, e-mail client, or computer. That is why I ditched Time Matters as a document organizer and used folders, dates, and filenames on my filesystem, instead.

And now that I have “freed” my e-mail and documents at least partially, I am trying to find ways to do the same with my due dates, to-dos, and appointments. Stay tuned while I search for a solution, and please share yours, if you have one.