I had a client experience the other day that got me thinking about IT professionals, Web 2.0 and the not-so-simple act of “keeping up” with today’s incredible pace of technology change.

I was in an IT meeting with abouteighteenIT managers. It was my first meeting with this group. I noted that EVERY one of them brought laptop computers with them, opened them, and started working on them. I commented on the somewhat unusual sight, and one of them said, “This is part of our ‘green’ initiative - saves paper!”

At the end of the meeting, I asked again about the laptops, and someone confessed, “The reality is, I get 300 company emails a day. I have to keep up with them or I’ll have an unthinkable backlog, and work will stop because many of these message are from people who need my response in order to do their work.” I appreciated her honesty, and was not offended - they’d all dropped into their keyboarding activities from the very start of the meeting, and seemed to do a good job of being engaged in the meeting, while keeping up with their email.

However, as I left the meeting, I worried about how these IT professionalskeep up with changing technologies and important trends when their days seems to consist mostly of keeping up with emails. I probed around this question with a sample from the group and got a consistent answer that they really have a hard time doing this, while striking a reasonable work/life balance. Keeping up with 300+ emails is a real inhibitor to growth and learning!

So, what’s this got to do with Web 2.0 and blogging? At least a couple of things:

1. Based on my personal experience, validated by conversations with other companies who have moved to social networking tools (see, for example, this NY Times article on IBM) it is possible to move much of the daily corporate messaging load to collaboration tools and Instant Messaging, thereby spending significantly less time fighting the in-box monster.
2. When I started blogging, I realized that in order to be well informed and able to engage in important global conversations about our profession, I HAD to invest time in reading more - especially, selected parts of the blogosphere. This increased my Web 2.0 literacy as I had to use web readers, RSS feeds and the like. It also tapped me into an incredibly rich source of timely information. Yes, there’s a lot of self-promoting, mind-numbing rubbish out there - but you, as the reader, get to select which blogs you will check in on. And those typically point you to other interesting conversations as they surface.

The lesson - if you are drowning in email, take charge, get back in control, and make sure each and every day has some “white space” for your personal developmental needs. You owe that to your employer, and to yourself. Don’t be one of those victims who wear their email burden like a “badge of courage”!