I’ve recently had the opportunity to take a few weeks from the office and it’s been an amazing mental experience. My first week was a family vacation – noted in the previous post – and as part of this trip I did a complete disconnect – no phone and no email. I had my phone with me and “damn you” T-Mobile, the two times I turned it on, I received a call within a few minutes! Week two was a business trip to Dublin Ireland for a leadership and management training which was a great experience. I work for in a major world wide agency and actually on a globally managed piece of business, but I had not yet had the opportunity to really understand what else was going on within the companies around me – at least from people who don’t also work on my account.
The most interesting thing I’ve taken away from the time is a sense of perspective and the relative importance of matters at hand. A simple difference in where I am today, vs. even a few months back.
When I took some time back in January, I remained connected and it only took until Tuesday for the calls to start. Once engaged, my vacation became more of a remote working environment. I worked far less than normal, and actually found the deluge of email to be crushing. I had hundreds of unread email and was never able to catch up reading them all – in many ways I really did not want to try and deal with it all, but still I felt the pressure.
During this last round of time out of the office, it finally occurred to me that it’s not only impossible to read eery single email, it’s not required. There are currently 314 unread emails in my archived inbox (5522 total still to be filed) and 133 unread messages in my online inbox (677 total waiting for action, filing or delete). This might freak a few people out – actually it does still make me uncomfortable, but there’s little I can do to prevent the daily deluge. What I can do is manage my time, focus and deal with prioritized pieces on various projects that require my attention. If it’s really that important people follow-up. Otherwise, it’s a search away when you are looking for something.
I am committed to working smarter, maintaining a perspective on the job at hand and most importantly sharing this with the people with whom I work. We’ve spent a great deal of time this past year (my time off corresponded nicely with my 1 year anniversary) running and reacting, rather than being able to stop, focus and plan.