Lie Back When You Are Away From Work to Avoid Wasting Time on the Phone While on Vacation
You need to unplug on vacation, but it can be tricky if you carry your work on your device in your pocket. To keep your emails and work-related messages from crashing , customize your “out of office” response.
Technology, culture, whatever you blame, work-life balance is becoming increasingly difficult to achieve. Many of us check work from time to time, even when we should be unplugged , and this only encourages colleagues or clients to pester you when you need to relax.
Here’s what career coach Regan Walsh suggests in the Harvard Business Review :
Even if you do plan to check in from time to time, let people know that you will have limited access to email and that you are waiting for a response immediately after or immediately after your return.
I had one client who went on vacation for the first time in many years, but it was impossible to completely disconnect from the network. She told me that she planned to check her email “only” twice a day.
However, if you tell people that she is available, they will only invite them to contact her and wait for a response. Therefore, she made sure that her absence from the workplace informed everyone that she would have limited access to email and when to expect a response.
Once you’ve done that, you can create your own schedule without feeling guilty if you don’t reply to every email every single day. This is simple advice and it’s not even a lie. It’s just vague. Ideally, you would restrict email access, but even if you don’t (say you want to check it so you don’t get overwhelmed with email when you return), no one should know, which allows you to maintain control of your own schedule.