Successfully pulling away from work e-mail while on vacation
Feb 4th, 2008 by Nick
I certainly did not take a complete break from the internet while I was in Australia. For one thing, I wrote over 50 entries in this blog. I used Skype to call home on days where I had purchased in-room internet access, I checked my personal email, I bought airplane tickets online, I used a few internet cafes to cut costs. But I did pull away from general work e-mail successfully for three weeks. And for you Type A personalities out there (and goodness knows I’m not one of them) the world did not end while I was gone.
For those of you who feel that you cannot pull away for three weeks, try these steps on a simple one-week vacation.
- Get yourself a temporary and disposable email address. Gmail works fine and is actually preferable if you’re going to use a lot of internet cafes. Delete the address when you get back so that any email accidentally sent to that address in the future bounces. [Since I have my own email domain, I was able to create a unique email and forward it to my home email while I was on vacation, and to my work mail when I got back.]
- Set your work email autoresponder to explain that you are gone and who should be contacted. If your email server has a rules-base, you can write rules to automatically forward certain emails to certain people (I did not do that);
- Give your full itinerary including hotel phone/fax numbers to one or two trusted people with instructions to call you if there’s an absolute meltdown;
- Give a broader set of colleagues the emergency email address and let them know that it’s fine to send you email to that address (as blind copy, using your work email as the regular recipient) if there’s an issue where it’s not obvious what your reaction would be and where they think you need to be involved. Let people know it’ll probably take 48 hours for you to get back to them; and
- Allow yourself to check the emergency email address almost every day. Quickly deal with whatever comes in, and get on with your vacation.
Of course, if you’re self-employed, this may not work (but see below). But I find that this approach relaxes me on two fronts:
- It keeps my mind from distracted by items my colleagues know both how to handle themselves and how I’d handle them if I was in the office; and
- It keeps my mind settled that the house is not burning down, because if it’s truly important, they’ll find me.
In three weeks, I received two email messages, one of which I specifically asked to be forwarded if it arrived. There was one other item which never arrived which I figured would, so I sent back a quick note asking about it, and got two brief responses. That was it. I don’t think I spent more than two hours on work on the entire trip, until the morning I flew back from Sydney, when I went online and downloaded my email so I could have something to do on the flight.
I had never been able to put my finger on why this combination of prohibiting most email but encouraging people to contact me is so effective. Then I read a blog post by Tim Ferriss, self-employed author of The Four Hour Work Week.
Your colleagues will not let anything truly “bad” happen - the worst that will happen is that something is not phrased or positioned exactly how you’d like it. You have the freedom to let go and enjoy your vacation supremely confident in them. But if they’re not sure what you’d do, they have the freedom of asking you and not feeling badly about it. I think it’s this shared freedom that it’s ok to “focus on something else,” and it’ll be ok when they go on vacation, that makes the process work.
