Avoiding Work on Vacation
Apr. 18th, 2022 07:40 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
canyonwalkerHawaii April Travelog #24
Waikoloa - Wed, 13 Apr, 2022, 5pm
A big downside of it becoming so easy to work remotely is that boundaries between "at work" and "not at work" disappear. It used to be that when colleagues don't see you at your desk, they know you're out. Now, since they never see you at a desk (or really at all) anymore they don't have that as an indicator. And in US business culture there's a widespread desire on the part of workers to stay involved in work, whether during late nights, weekends, or entire weeks off.
Well, I am in the middle of an entire week off. How am I doing in making my time off, off?
I'm doing really well in that regard. Getting sucked back into work while I'm away has never been a weakness of mine. But even one instance of, "Oh, let me just respond to this one thing..." can turn into 30 minutes, 45, or more at a clip.
I've been checking my work email queue about once a day— from my phone. I decided to do that initially just to delete obvious spam. That had the pleasing effect of reducing the number of unread messages on the mail icon— reducing my worry about how much of a backlog I'll face next Monday morning.
Then I figured as long as I'm scanning subject lines and the first sentence or so of the email (i.e., what's shown in the preview mode) I'll see if anything indicates clear urgency, like "CW, this is on fire, please help!" So far nothing has.
Slack has been another potential source of distraction. A few coworkers have @-ed me in channels or DMs. I ignored those at first on Monday. By Tuesday they started to get annoying, so I responded to them just to say, "I'm on vacation this week, I'll get back to you on Monday." My coworkers were all 100% understanding and stopped pinging me. I didn't have to go to the extreme measure of disabling Slack on my phone.
Waikoloa - Wed, 13 Apr, 2022, 5pm
A big downside of it becoming so easy to work remotely is that boundaries between "at work" and "not at work" disappear. It used to be that when colleagues don't see you at your desk, they know you're out. Now, since they never see you at a desk (or really at all) anymore they don't have that as an indicator. And in US business culture there's a widespread desire on the part of workers to stay involved in work, whether during late nights, weekends, or entire weeks off.
Well, I am in the middle of an entire week off. How am I doing in making my time off, off?
I'm doing really well in that regard. Getting sucked back into work while I'm away has never been a weakness of mine. But even one instance of, "Oh, let me just respond to this one thing..." can turn into 30 minutes, 45, or more at a clip.
I've been checking my work email queue about once a day— from my phone. I decided to do that initially just to delete obvious spam. That had the pleasing effect of reducing the number of unread messages on the mail icon— reducing my worry about how much of a backlog I'll face next Monday morning.
Then I figured as long as I'm scanning subject lines and the first sentence or so of the email (i.e., what's shown in the preview mode) I'll see if anything indicates clear urgency, like "CW, this is on fire, please help!" So far nothing has.
Slack has been another potential source of distraction. A few coworkers have @-ed me in channels or DMs. I ignored those at first on Monday. By Tuesday they started to get annoying, so I responded to them just to say, "I'm on vacation this week, I'll get back to you on Monday." My coworkers were all 100% understanding and stopped pinging me. I didn't have to go to the extreme measure of disabling Slack on my phone.
