Mike Stenberg, Head of Digital Marketing at Siemens AG, is a long-term personal user of GTD®, and has implemented it on several teams that he has led or consulted for.
Returning from vacation to find an email inbox with hundreds of unread emails is a familiar situation these days. Not only that, but as everyone seems have to been waiting for your return, new conversations quickly flow in on top of the backlog, and getting anywhere near to inbox zero is a constant hassle in the first week after vacation. The relaxation of the recent holiday can go up in smoke pretty quickly.
This summer I have tried something new. An experiment to minimise the hassle and get me back to a clean inbox as soon as possible after my return. I created a very simple rule that moved every incoming email immediately from the inbox into a folder called ‘vacation’. This helped me resist the desire to ‘accidentally’ check email in quiet moments on the beach and get pulled out of my holiday mindset. It was a small change, but it worked for me because it required a conscious decision to scroll down to the ‘vacation’ folder to do some reading.
On my return to the office earlier this week I was looking at a clean inbox. Happy days! By disabling the rule, you immediately receive all new emails which you can easily clarify with your standard five-phase GTD® routine.
So what to do with the vacation folder? Ignoring it was not an option for me.
I set a blocker of 30 mins in my calendar for my first day back to get that folder to zero after vacation as well. Sorting by ‘sender’ and/ or ‘conversation’ I got rid of newsletters, LinkedIn contact requests, and email threads that don’t include any next action or project in seconds (by using CTRL + D on the conversation group header). Emails which still required a follow up or included actions were moved back into the inbox to be clarified there.
It might sound utopic, but I was in fact done with a couple of hundred emails in approximately 30 mins. I moved about 10-15 emails back to ‘in’, and from there easily clarified them into in my system with appropriate projects and next actions.
Pro tip: if you are feeling courageous you can also put in you out of office reply that the sender should resend their email after your return if the topic is still current. For topics requiring immediate attention you could indicate that you are available by text (if you are willing to do so). That would give you air cover if you did in fact choose to ignore the vacation folder upon your return. In my experience the conversation in the organisation has often moved on quickly from the original request, and in many cases no action is required two weeks later.
A few days into my return, I’m declaring my experiment a success. I was able to ramp up to full speed with much less stress than in previous years, and have managed to preserve more of the benefits that a relaxed mind can bring to old problems in my work.
How about you? Would love to learn from your experience. What methods have you developed over time to bring the momentum of a splendid vacation back to work – and keep focused on your higher horizons?
I take the same approach but dont have a rule to move any new emails to the vacation folder which is a good idea!
In times past I’ve cleared my inbox the night before returning, it usually takes about 2 – 3 hours, during this I delay send any replies to the morning.
This time I didn’t do that and I was only able to get clear after 2 days!
I’ll try your technique next time, but I wonder if 30 minutes would be enough.
I once heard of an OoO message that said words to the effect of “I’m on my honeymoon. If you think you really need to get in touch, here’s my father in law’s number, see if you can persuade him to pass me a message”.
I cannot decide if I’m a fan of the “while I’m away all messages left for me will be deleted, so either find someone else to help you or resend the message when I’m back” approach that has recently drawn a lot of attention. What I can say is that most people when they hear the idea seem to say 1) How fantastic followed by 2) I could never do that. Which is interesting.
Mike’s tactics are great. Somewhat similarly, I just took 4 days off to do as much “nothing” as I could do, in a cottage on the west coast of Ireland (one of the best places I could find with nothing to do.) I created a “Monday” email folder, for the first day I’d be back in office mode, and shunted emails into it that could wait. I actually did brief scans of my email daily, because I always get some that are simply enjoyable or interesting (fits within my “do nothing” parameters), over a glass of wine or whiskey (Irish, of course). But those that I know will trigger my thinking muscle and potential response are moved to “Monday.” Like Mike’s blog here. I know it’s Tuesday already, but my “Monday” folder is almost empty. Ta da.