It’s International Work Out Loud Week where we show the process of what we are working and learning, and today I share how I relearned Outlook.

I’m all for social collaboration but lots of companies haven’t explained the value of this to their workers so that it makes sense.

Or, they’ve got their ESNs and they still use email because that’s how the majority in their company communicate.

Or, they may not have the fundamental skills and behaviours to deal with information overwhelm.

I share how I learned Outlook using a blend of formal, informal and social learning activities so that I could set up some strategies to help my clients understand that it’s not the fault of the tool, it’s our behaviours.

I wanted to go back to the basics of skills such as:

• Looking at our workflow critically – what is actual value based work vs ‘busy’ work?
• How can I help clients look at their work and think of it in terms of what they can automate, filter, streamline?
• How can I apply what I learned on this to the skills we need to manage the overwhelm when workers get asked to use ESN’s like Yammer and Teams.

Think of your work as inflows & what you need to do to FREE up time in email & refocus on doing value work or you’ll still be swamped!

This blog post by Helen Blunden was written in Melbourne, Australia and is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.