Should you check email on vacation or face a tsunami of messages once you’re back at the office?
For workers at war with their inboxes, neither is a great option.
That’s why many people choose something in the middle. But even monitoring email on holiday “is almost always a bad move,” said Zachary Weiner, CEO of the marketing company Emerging Insider Communications.
“Once that Pandora’s box is open, you usually find yourself having to respond, having to put out fires, unintentionally spending hours and hours of time,” he said.
Still, some 84% of white-collar workers do it, and more than 70% are triaging messages from three or more platforms — like Teams, Slack and WhatsApp — said work-life balance consultant Joe Robinson.
“Everyone is dog paddling out there in this tidal wave,” he said. “We’re doing everything wrong. That’s why everybody’s so frazzled.”
Email Intervention Campaign” earlier this month to deal with issues like “vacation email panic,” he told CNBC Travel.
According to a survey of workers he conducted in April:
- 25% have skipped a vacation to avoid email backlog when returning to the office
- 34% have shortened vacations for the same reason
- 87% favor a company policy to disconnect after work, except during emergencies
One company doing it right is the Mercedes-Benz Group, which lets employees auto-delete incoming email messages while they’re on vacation, he said. (Out-of-office messages alert senders that messages have been deleted, too.)
“I encounter tons of people who are burned out from email,” said work-life speaker and consultant Joe Robinson. Managers and “the people at the top are … worse off.”
Source: Joe Robinson
According to Robinson, 95% of respondents said they would support a similar policy at their companies.
Robinson advises companies to create defined email policies, ideally ones which give workers permission not to check email on vacation.
Gates Little, CEO of the U.S.-based lender altLine Sobanco, agreed, adding leadership should set the example.
“If your boss is always answering emails while away, don’t you think you’d be expected to do the same?” he said. “Whereas a boss who preaches work-life balance will set an example by not responding to emails until they return.”
The Annuity Expert.
2. Select an “email partner”
An “email partner” solves two problems, said Jack Underwood, CEO of the delivery software company Circuit. You can leave with peace of mind and avoid “an endless backlog of emails to dig through” upon your return.
Joe Robinson advises “partners” tackle emergency emails only, to avoid overburdening them. And Emerging Insider’s Weiner recommends instructing your “partner” to text — not email — to discuss urgent matters.
3. Set filters
Stanislav Khilobochenko, vice president of customer service at the cybersecurity company Clario, uses filters to distinguish urgent emails from irrelevant ones. He said, “I set up as many filters as possible so emails that arrive while I’m away are already sorted by priority.”
Kim Rohrer, principal people partner at human resources company Oyster, said she discovered her top email pro-tip during her 24-day honeymoon in 2011.
She sets up two filters:
- Send all mail to the archive and mark as read
- Send all mail with “README” in the subject to a special “README” folder
Via autoreply, she notifies senders she’s archiving all emails during her vacation dates. She refers urgent emails to a colleague, but asks that non-urgent emails “you’d like me to read … upon my return” be resent to her with “README” in the subject line.
“I once checked, and I had received over 3,000 emails after a two-week vacation, but only had four emails in my ‘read later’ folder,” she told CNBC Travel, which “just goes to show how much false urgency impacts our workloads.”
4. Mute notifications
To tune out work, mute email notifications and messenger systems, said Christy Pyrz, chief marketing officer of the supplement company Paradigm Peptides.
“Do yourself the favor,” she said. “Mute the apps.”