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Five Tips for Stemming the Flow of Emails During Holidays and Vacations

By Greg | December 21, 2006

How much of your holiday or vacation time do you spend tending to work-related emails? If you’re like me, you know the balancing act all too well: ignore emails completely, and every day your awareness grows of just how large the mountain may have grown when you return to work, but spend time dealing with them during your time off, and find yourself resenting the lost time as your holiday draws to a close. Yesterday, in my first week of 3 months of paternity leave, I decided on a radical shake-up of the ground rules for that balancing act.

The Email Balancing Act

The last thing I want to do during the Christmas season — or during my 3 months of paternity leave, which began this week — is spend time tending to work-related emails. But because one of my websites generates anywhere from dozens to hundreds of emails per day, if I do nothing with them, it will take me weeks just to catch up when I return to work. I realized early in this week that my fantasy of a big drop-off in emails once I announced my absence was clearly not going to work out: when I checked on Tuesday, there was scarcely a blip in the flow, and I spent a couple of hours tending to it all. Rrrrgggghhh.

So yesterday, I shook it all up, and today I am pleased to report around a 98% reduction. That much I can handle in a few minutes a couple of times per week.

Here’s how I did it, in the form of some ‘top tips’. Of course, your mileage may vary, and you may well answer some of the crucial questions below differently than I did, but here’s a start…

Top Tips for Halting the Flood of Emails

Quantify the cost/benefit relationship inherent in managing your emails, including the opportunity cost of simply not responding to some. Do this explicitly and honestly. What will you do about it, and how much will that cost?

What will it cost you, in hours, to manage all your work email? Exactly how many days of your time away will you lose to work-related email? What benefit will you get from the exercise? What’s the opportunity cost of just not responding to some? And what will it cost you in terms of background anxiety levels to know there is a rising tide of emails accumulating for your return?

Be honest with yourself. Are you surprised at the answers? I was. I was realized I would lose literally days — perhaps even weeks — of my time if I tried to keep on top of the flood. And if I didn’t, I’d have trouble managing the anxiety of knowing how much back log was accumulating.

Something would have to change. I decided I could easily dedicate a good few hours to reshaping my whole email landscape in return for getting all those days back.

Determine your boundaries, and make them explicit.

No one can determine your own boundaries except you, but once you’ve decided exactly where to draw the boundaries between work and time off, and how permeable to make those boundaries, no one should be in any doubt whatsoever about your boundaries.

In my case, although I had announced that I would be out of the office, and I had included full information on an availability page, it was still entirely possible for someone to find a way of getting in touch with me without necessarily bothering to check whether I was actually available. (And why should they have to go to the extra step of checking? Other people are busy, too!) So, I went back through the website in question and made it crystal clear that I am on paternity leave for 3 months, and emails would only be answered intermittently: no promises, no expectations, end of story. I am out of the office!

If you have an out-of-office autoresponder system in place, this is also a great spot to remind correspondents of just how available you are — whether that is not at all available, or occasionally available.

Just be careful with autoresponders: because they automatically reply to all incoming email, you can wind up sending out of office messages to mailing lists and the like, announcing that you’re away, and you can also wind up essentially confirming to every spam bot on the planet that the address they’ve just spammed is in full working order and ready to receive more spam.

Make it less trivial to send you an email — and in the process, cut the spam.

Normally, I don’t like challenge/response systems for reducing spam. These systems automatically reply to anyone writing to you with a request to perform some additional step before their message will be delivered, like visiting a special URL or replying in a particular way to the verification request. Only once they are verified (and of course you can pre-verify some addresses via a ‘white list’) will their message get through. These systems can be a huge help in reducing spam, but they can also be a real pain for other users who’d like to get in touch with you (or just write back to a message you’ve sent them in the first place). Also, like autoresponders, they can serve to confirm to spammers that the email address they’ve spammed is in full working order — meaning that if you do later shut off the system, the spam problem will be worse than it was before.

However, being out of the office on holiday is an excellent time to use a challenge/response system. In my case, I’ve re-organized my various email addresses so that everything being sent to around 2 dozen different address all forwards to the same temporary challenge/response address. That temporary challenge/response address is not one of my normal addresses, so if spammers discover it, I don’t care: I’ll just delete it in a few months when I’ve returned to work, and it won’t cost me anything.

The challenge/response system will accomplish two things: 1) it will cut down drastically on the amount of junk delivered to my inbox, and 2) it will insert an additional step into the communication process, so that only messages from correspondents who read the verification email (which notes prominently that I will not be responding quickly while on leave) AND continue on to verify their addresses will actually get through. I expect this to reduce significantly the number of quick one-liners I get requesting help on term papers, the requests from journalists for interviews or comments on impossibly short deadlines, etc.: if people are in too much of a rush to complete the verification process, or if they’re looking for a quick fix with a university project, I won’t hear from them any more at all.

Test, test, test again — and then test one more time.

If email is part of your business’s life blood, any temporary system you put in place while away should be as robust as you can manage in a reasonable amount of time. That means testing, re-testing, and testing one more time just for good measure.

In my own case, I discovered at least half a dozen potentially show-stopping bugs in how I had anticipated setting up my challenge/response system — ranging from obscure details of how my server encodes email addresses in my white list to big and obvious problems with how I had organized my layers of forwarding to the challenge/response address. I am now convinced that the system is working as I intend, and for me that translates directly into a lower level of stress and worry about what could go wrong if I’ve made a mistake.

Enjoy your new-found freedom from the email flood!

Remember that honest cost/benefit assessment? Well, don’t forget to enjoy the fruits of whatever labours you wound up investing to reduce the email flood!

In my case, it’s really worth something to me — over and above the actual time which I have freed up by shaking up my email landscape — to notice that hey, I have done this, and done it well. I have invested time directly in my own well-being by stopping the email flood. I am going to enjoy that time for myself. I am going to spend it with my wife, and with my new daughter when she is born any day now.

That’s what time off is for!

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