Instant messaging is my preferred method of collaboration and knowledge sharing while at work because it allows real-time interaction.

If an instant-message exchange lasts more than three minutes, I usually move the discussion to the telephone.

I.B.M. uses a Facebook-like site called Beehive and a personalized internal directory called Profiles.

These help build trust levels with peers in order to get a job done much faster, and they easily locate experts in a particular subject.

Other software used at I.B.M. helps me collaborate in various areas:

• blogs
• social bookmarking
• social tagging
• participation in online communities to which I belong
• an alert system for to-do items.

I quickly realized that the more messages you answer, the more messages you generate in return. It becomes a vicious cycle. By trying hard to stop the cycle, I cut the number of e-mails that I receive by 80 percent in a single week.

I share and update big files with a file sharing system that cuts down on the back-and-forth of sending big presentations and video files.

Say someone asks to view a presentation you have done recently, and you decide to share it via an open “file sharing” space. Then, before you know it, strangers thank you for sharing that presentation, which they will be reusing themselves within their own projects. That kind of immediate impact would be unlikely through e-mail.

figure out which conversations you can move out of your e-mail system

use social networking tools to:

• eliminate spam
• avoid repeatedly answering the same question from many different people
• avoid an accumulation of online newsletters that never get read
• avoid incessant project status reports that clutter many in-boxes.

By trying hard to stop the cycle, I cut the number of e-mails that I receive by 80 percent in a single week. It’s not that I stopped communicating; I just communicated in different and more productive ways.

EARLIER this year, I became tired of my usual morning ritual of spending hours catching up on e-mail. So I did something drastic to take back control of my productivity. I stopped using e-mail most of the time.

Many people wondered how I would manage to communicate and collaborate with my peers without using e-mail.

I use a couple of R.S.S./Atom feed readers, which have become not just another in-box, but my primary method of receiving notifications of content relevant to my work.

They give me control of what I receive and when, something I couldn’t say when I was relying much more heavily on e-mail.

I’ve been able to prove how much more I can accomplish by answering a question, and posting it on a blog, for example, than I can by answering the same question over and over.

I started this experiment by announcing my intention on a couple of blogs, like my personal one and blogs inside I.B.M.’s firewall.

Mainly, it is about a change of habits, about finding new ways to be much more productive with less effort, so that we can focus on more complex tasks.

Luis Suarez of I.B.M., near his home in the Canary Islands. With the help of social networking tools, he has cut down sharply on his daily e-mail.

Other people can join in the discussions — maybe they will have a better idea than mine.

I’m a “social computing evangelist” for I.B.M. and have used social software tools for years to collaborate on projects and to share knowledge.

Instead of responding individually to messages that arrived in my in-box, I started to use more social networking tools, like instant messaging, blogs and wikis, among many others.

I also started to use the telephone much more than I did before, which has the added advantage of being a more personal form of interaction.

I never gave up my work e-mail address, because I still need it for some work-related activities — for example, for one-on-one discussions that are too private and confidential to discuss publicly.

The first step was to decide which social software tools were available for me to use much more extensively.

The second was to encourage people to stop using e-mail themselves and to start using some of these same social software tools as well, to share their knowledge and collaborate with one another.