How do we be better at shutting off for holidays and not come home to a full inbox?
Answers (12)
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Dave M.
Professional trade show booth traffic builder and party entertainer. Corporate and private sector events.
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Don't turn on your computer while on vacation or holiday.
Adam W.
Sales Executive, Specializing in harnessing public cloud platforms to drive tangible benefits
We are NOT in control of people sending emails - we ARE in control of how we manage the situation. Address the daunting inbox with the following priority: Customers, Team, Friends. If you're hyper-transparent, share that on your OOO greeting.
Brendan C.
Business Development / Technical Sales
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One benefit of vacation is recharging your batteries and when done properly one will be much more effective at doing one's job.
If you spend your entire vacation checking e-mails then you run the risk of burning out.
One approach should be to have a voicemail and out of office e-mail response indicating that you are on vacation and to the extent that something is urgent call these two people.
One can also alert their customers in advance that you will be on vaca with the idea of closing any pressing issues before you go away.
To the extent that you simply can not turn off 100% then check your e-mails and respond only to those that are most important, but try and limit this to a small amount of time each day.
I'd rather come home to a full inbox than work my entire vacation.
Burning out is not in your best interest or that of your company.
Perhaps there is some wisdom to be gained from "Good to Great" here in that the best run company is one in which no one is irreplaceable and while Collins was talking about people leaving a company I think this also applies to going on vacation.
Dean E.
Deputy Director, Division at CTSC
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Trust your staff and delegate to them while you are away.
Ask for assistance. There must be at least one trusted person to review your inbox and flag items that need your attention upon return to the office. Everything else gets purged based on some "filtering" rules you defined and communicated with the person selected to assist you. If you are an executive with assistants to lean on, do it! Otherwise, the buddy system works very well in my experience. Every deserves total downtime to recharge.
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Brijendra C.
Human Resources at Dodsal E & C Pte Ltd
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run autofilters to divert them in a particular folder
Sahar A.
Diversity& Inclusion|Leadership training|Social Media Marketing|Social Media Training|Public Speaker|Culture Competence
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Always think about the work life balance- work hard and play harder
Yes shut your engines off during the holidays I did for 2 weeks and felt a lot better after I came back but I had planned on 1 week after I came back from vacation to catch up s you plan in advance
Always let your clients know in advance when you will not be available and for how long. Give them enough advance notice so that if they need something finishing before you go away it can be done. Always leave some sort of back up but explain that it is just that a back up and not a full time replacement of you.
Dr Giles B.
Director at Quarto Perspective
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Hi Jeff,
Quite a few things in there:
Biggest one is perhaps Communication, Communication, Communication
Auto reply while on holiday
Communication with people before you go to let them know you are away and to hopefully clear/tie up loose ends before you are away.
Delegation before holiday, and direction of who to contact while you are away, share mail boxes.
Auto filter emails
At any point apply - Do, Delegate, Delay, Delete.
If there is a lot of (internal) email, it could be worth considering moving towards a culture of reduction of email communication.
Giles.
Judy H.
*Exp. CEO & Speaker *Leadership Development Specialist *Mentor & Coach to SMEs *Writer, Trainer and E-learning Designer
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Hi Jeff,
Make sure there is always an automatic reply that lets people know you are away and won't be available to address their email. Advise them that your expectation is that they will re-send it if the problem still exists on the day of your return. Otherwise, you will consider the matter finalised.
Obviously you will want to read and follow up on some of these things, but it is a lot faster to read and get yourself across what's been happening than to get bogged down in the process of addressing each one. This way, the accountability goes back to your team.
The other thing is probably very obvious, but make sure there is someone trained to take your place, monitoring and handling calls and emails, and who has the authority to deal with it or to ask the right person to deal with it.
As others have suggested, send personal emails, newsletters and other subscriptions to an inbox specially designated for this, so that you can read these later.
Shutting off for holidays is a mind set and comes after you know you have trained your team effectively and put in place the right processes for your work to be handled whilst you are away.
Bernard G.
Programme, Project & Change expert
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Develop your team, so there are good people to fill in while you are away, then set up rules to sensibly forward mail to them. It will be a great chance for them to show they can cope and are good team.
