Last month I had a vacation of sorts (as I mentioned before). During this time, I had some personal revelations about my life—both personally and work wise. I lend this to the fact that I spent multiple days at a time unplugged and completely disconnected from the Internet. No laptop. No tablet. No smartphone.
I highly recommend you do it sometime—if not regularly.
Not only did it force me to pause, clear my head, and have some self-reflection, but it also gave me a chance to contrast what I considered to be my ‘normal’ life with actual living.
One of the things I learned and would like to share with you has to do with my life as a digital tentmaker, but could also be a lesson for a fulltime freelancer or small business owner.
When On Vacation…
If you are a digital tentmaker, fulltime freelancer, or small business owner, you know that when you’re not “getting ahead” in your work and projects, you’re “getting behind.” There isn’t someone who can usually fill-in and handle things. This can make it really difficult to go an entire week without logging in. After all, if a website goes down or a customer needs to be taken care of, you are the only one that can take care of it!
During the first part of my vacation, I went four full days without checking any of my email.
That was a big mistake.
While it felt liberating to ignore the Internet completly those four days, when I did finally ‘check-in,’ it was difficult to sift through my 300+ emails. My wife helpfully reminded me that she had recommended that I take 10-minutes just before going to bed every night to go through my emails. Had I listened to her in the first place, things would not have piled up so badly!
So that’s what I did during the second half of my vacation.
Every night I took a few minutes to ‘trim’ my email down. I left important emails as ‘unread’ and tore through everything else. I was suprised with how many emails I recieved that were status information about ChurchMag, newsletters I receive for blog post ideas, or short emails that were just quick FYI’s or required a short sentenced reply.
Lesson learned!
So, the next time I am on vacation or I have someone visiting me from the United States, I’ll be taking a few mintues every day—setting a timer if I need to—and dealing with my email. Not only does it help me relax about the uknown of unchecked email, but makes getting back into the grind a whole lot easier.
Matt says
Perhaps a better solution would be to send an auto reply letting the emailers know you are on vacation, giving them an alternative contact, and letting them know you will be deleting all emails received without reading them. That’s worked well for me.
Eric Dye says
Good idea. That might work for some accounts, but those relating to customers I’m not sure would work too well. :-/