That's when you go away and turn off your email.
December 16, 2020 10:04 AM Subscribe
Cory Doctorow discusses implementing danah boyd's "email sabbatical" A week in advance, she warns everyone again that she's going offline and shuttering her inboxes. Close family members and her network administrator are given instructions for reaching her while on break, but no one else is.
She leaves, and shuts down her email. She knows she's going to miss new, time-sensitive stuff, but makes peace with it. In return, she gets the peace of mind that comes from knowing that she's going to come home to an empty in-box.
She leaves, and shuts down her email. She knows she's going to miss new, time-sensitive stuff, but makes peace with it. In return, she gets the peace of mind that comes from knowing that she's going to come home to an empty in-box.
This seems like more trouble than spending a day dealing with a couple weeks of e-mails when you get back.
posted by jonathanhughes at 10:17 AM on December 16, 2020 [30 favorites]
posted by jonathanhughes at 10:17 AM on December 16, 2020 [30 favorites]
johnathanhughes: But then you lose out on letting everyone know how important and connected you are!
posted by SoberHighland at 10:20 AM on December 16, 2020 [59 favorites]
posted by SoberHighland at 10:20 AM on December 16, 2020 [59 favorites]
I’m gonna send a company wide email that they can’t talk to me
posted by bxvr at 10:25 AM on December 16, 2020 [5 favorites]
posted by bxvr at 10:25 AM on December 16, 2020 [5 favorites]
This seems pretty involved. I just don’t respond until I feel like it.
posted by scantee at 10:27 AM on December 16, 2020 [12 favorites]
posted by scantee at 10:27 AM on December 16, 2020 [12 favorites]
The unexamined privilege of someone without a boss. But hey, Danah Boyd and Cory Doctorow are prime examples of people who pretty much don't understand how out of touch they are.
posted by tclark at 10:28 AM on December 16, 2020 [87 favorites]
posted by tclark at 10:28 AM on December 16, 2020 [87 favorites]
As someone who gets ~200 work emails per day that are not actually spam: needing to do something like this means you're not doing vacation email right.
1) Get off of lists that you don't actually read, or turn them into digests. Vacation's a good excuse to do this cleanup.
2) Turn off your alerts because someone else should be handling them while you're on vacation.
3) Set up labels and filters that will flag and categorize every piece of email you receive that you actually care about, so they're easy to sort through in the future.
4) Finally, create a label called "to me" and have a filter apply it to anything that you're actually in the To: line for.
5) When you get back, read everything in (4) that doesn't also have a label from (3). If you're like me, that will be ~0.5% of your email.
6) Mark everything else as Read.
If people complain, tell them you were on vacation.
posted by xthlc at 10:30 AM on December 16, 2020 [76 favorites]
1) Get off of lists that you don't actually read, or turn them into digests. Vacation's a good excuse to do this cleanup.
2) Turn off your alerts because someone else should be handling them while you're on vacation.
3) Set up labels and filters that will flag and categorize every piece of email you receive that you actually care about, so they're easy to sort through in the future.
4) Finally, create a label called "to me" and have a filter apply it to anything that you're actually in the To: line for.
5) When you get back, read everything in (4) that doesn't also have a label from (3). If you're like me, that will be ~0.5% of your email.
6) Mark everything else as Read.
If people complain, tell them you were on vacation.
posted by xthlc at 10:30 AM on December 16, 2020 [76 favorites]
"But then you lose out on letting everyone know how important and connected you are!"
Ha! I was going to mention that.
Also he needs to proofread.
posted by jonathanhughes at 10:34 AM on December 16, 2020 [2 favorites]
Ha! I was going to mention that.
Also he needs to proofread.
posted by jonathanhughes at 10:34 AM on December 16, 2020 [2 favorites]
Good for him, I guess, but if I (or anyone in my immediate circle) tried to do such a thing, even with six months' notice, it would likely be treated as resigning with six months' notice.
posted by jedicus at 10:35 AM on December 16, 2020 [8 favorites]
posted by jedicus at 10:35 AM on December 16, 2020 [8 favorites]
The unexamined privilege of someone without a boss.
I dunno, I have a boss and also don't answer any email while I'm on vacation. I just warn people ahead of time and set an out of office reply. It's pretty common in my industry. Hell, most people don't even provide information on who else to contact, the auto-reply is literally just, "I'm not here, back in a week."
When I come back in the office, my workflow is to select all unread emails from my time off and delete them unread. If it was important, the sender already found someone else to contact about it.
posted by backseatpilot at 10:35 AM on December 16, 2020 [19 favorites]
I dunno, I have a boss and also don't answer any email while I'm on vacation. I just warn people ahead of time and set an out of office reply. It's pretty common in my industry. Hell, most people don't even provide information on who else to contact, the auto-reply is literally just, "I'm not here, back in a week."
When I come back in the office, my workflow is to select all unread emails from my time off and delete them unread. If it was important, the sender already found someone else to contact about it.
posted by backseatpilot at 10:35 AM on December 16, 2020 [19 favorites]
Honestly this seems like something that I should probably try myself. I have awful anxiety about opening my work email on normal days, to the point where it sometimes prevents me from doing my job. I always put up an auto-reply when I take PTO, and when I come back to an inbox with 200+ messages my anxiety just goes bonkers.
posted by lazaruslong at 10:40 AM on December 16, 2020 [5 favorites]
posted by lazaruslong at 10:40 AM on December 16, 2020 [5 favorites]
Note for mods: danah boyd prefers to render her name in all-lowercase, it’s not just a typo in the article.
posted by migurski at 10:40 AM on December 16, 2020 [9 favorites]
posted by migurski at 10:40 AM on December 16, 2020 [9 favorites]
Her name is danah boyd, all lowercase.
posted by muddgirl at 10:40 AM on December 16, 2020 [3 favorites]
posted by muddgirl at 10:40 AM on December 16, 2020 [3 favorites]
Good for him, I guess, but if I (or anyone in my immediate circle) tried to do such a thing, even with six months' notice, it would likely be treated as resigning with six months' notice.
Yeah, I was thinking that for most people, it would be like that Simpsons bit:
Yeah, I was thinking that for most people, it would be like that Simpsons bit:
Marge: The plant said if you don't come tomorrow, don't bother coming Monday.posted by star gentle uterus at 10:47 AM on December 16, 2020 [17 favorites]
Homer: Woo-hoo! Four-day weekend!
The ability to tell people that you're roundfiling their email is privilege, and one that many of us do not have the luxury of enjoying. I recently took a much needed two week sabbatical from work, and the very idea that I would shut off my email was ridiculous. But, I wasn't too worried about my backlog because a) I have a good boss who supports his team and doesn't want to see them burnt out, b) part of how he manages that is to have systems for handling leave where the team as a whole picks up the slack (in my case, I handed off the active projects on my plate to a coworker who served as caretaker), and c) I've always found things like "email zero" to be ridiculous, so having an "empty" inbox has never been a worry - as long as needed communication are going through, there's no need to worry about every email getting a response. Because I handed my work off, anything time-sensitive gets handled by my team,so that's not a worry (and both my boss and my coworker know how to contact me if it becomes necessary.)
posted by NoxAeternum at 10:49 AM on December 16, 2020 [6 favorites]
posted by NoxAeternum at 10:49 AM on December 16, 2020 [6 favorites]
It reads like...a vacation? All the pressure he feels is self-imposed.
Telling folks you'll be gone is good form. Checking in with folks before you leave is good form. Then you put up your out-of-office message which directs people to who can help them in the meanwhile, and fuck off.
The rest is just setting up good filters, which should already be in place for your typical day-to-day.
posted by explosion at 10:49 AM on December 16, 2020 [6 favorites]
Telling folks you'll be gone is good form. Checking in with folks before you leave is good form. Then you put up your out-of-office message which directs people to who can help them in the meanwhile, and fuck off.
The rest is just setting up good filters, which should already be in place for your typical day-to-day.
posted by explosion at 10:49 AM on December 16, 2020 [6 favorites]
This seems like more trouble than spending a day dealing with a couple weeks of e-mails when you get back.
Exactly and absent-mindedly thumbing through old emails is exactly how you deal with the first day back at work, known as your 'vacation hangover'. "Sorry, can't work on that or converse about anything I don't want to talk about - I'm stuck in email jail. ". Everybody gets it.
posted by The_Vegetables at 10:56 AM on December 16, 2020 [44 favorites]
Exactly and absent-mindedly thumbing through old emails is exactly how you deal with the first day back at work, known as your 'vacation hangover'. "Sorry, can't work on that or converse about anything I don't want to talk about - I'm stuck in email jail. ". Everybody gets it.
posted by The_Vegetables at 10:56 AM on December 16, 2020 [44 favorites]
When I was much younger, I actually tried this during a week-long holiday. When I got back people brought it up in conversation and found it hilariously stupid (although they didn’t fire me because I was in an academic situation). I’m telling you this because I was young, and foolish, and very into boingboing at the time, but what works for Cory and his friends is not necessarily best practice. Even though he continually acts like it is.
Also, it’s freaking 2020, what holiday am I going on? And how is my mum going to send me pictures of the neighbourhood cats?
posted by The River Ivel at 10:57 AM on December 16, 2020 [15 favorites]
Also, it’s freaking 2020, what holiday am I going on? And how is my mum going to send me pictures of the neighbourhood cats?
posted by The River Ivel at 10:57 AM on December 16, 2020 [15 favorites]
Work-life balance is always going to be a negotiation, especially as we are increasingly connected to our jobs via gadgets and apps etc., and whatever that might become ten, twenty years down the road. There's a solid discussion to be had about that, but I'm not sure this article is a good starting point. I can't imagine my boss would respond too kindly if I called them a "collaborator" and wished them luck, whilst I hop off for x days. I can't imagine most people who still have jobs — and the bosses that invariably go along with those jobs — have the privilege to maintain work relationships of that kind.
posted by They sucked his brains out! at 11:09 AM on December 16, 2020 [2 favorites]
posted by They sucked his brains out! at 11:09 AM on December 16, 2020 [2 favorites]
If Cory Doctorow has the privilege of going on an email sabbatical, it's because he took the risk of becoming a working writer. Do we need to hate him for that? It feels petty.
posted by mecran01 at 11:11 AM on December 16, 2020 [22 favorites]
posted by mecran01 at 11:11 AM on December 16, 2020 [22 favorites]
Here's the rationale: if you allow email to pile up while you're trying to unwind, it'll take months to catch up on when you get back, and you'll immediately burn out, incinerating all the value you got out of your break.
Eh.
This is why you catch up on email from newest to oldest. I stole this from somewhere, maybe a comment here, but this way you can watch solved problems fix themselves!
posted by Nonsteroidal Anti-Inflammatory Drug at 11:17 AM on December 16, 2020 [8 favorites]
Eh.
This is why you catch up on email from newest to oldest. I stole this from somewhere, maybe a comment here, but this way you can watch solved problems fix themselves!
posted by Nonsteroidal Anti-Inflammatory Drug at 11:17 AM on December 16, 2020 [8 favorites]
why are we still here? just to suffer? every day i get emails
posted by Lanark at 11:18 AM on December 16, 2020 [12 favorites]
posted by Lanark at 11:18 AM on December 16, 2020 [12 favorites]
Do we need to hate him for that? It feels petty.
Because he's never seems to realize that he won the cosmic lottery and was at the right place at the right time to ride the zeitgeist. A lot of the stuff like this comes across as, "if you just follow these same easy steps as me, you too can be happy and successful." Compare the difference in how he and Amanda Palmer talk about the idea of giving away content and hoping that money will follow vs. Radiohead.
posted by Candleman at 11:25 AM on December 16, 2020 [36 favorites]
Because he's never seems to realize that he won the cosmic lottery and was at the right place at the right time to ride the zeitgeist. A lot of the stuff like this comes across as, "if you just follow these same easy steps as me, you too can be happy and successful." Compare the difference in how he and Amanda Palmer talk about the idea of giving away content and hoping that money will follow vs. Radiohead.
posted by Candleman at 11:25 AM on December 16, 2020 [36 favorites]
This seems like more trouble than spending a day dealing with a couple weeks of e-mails when you get back.
Have you tried just ghosting everyone? It has the secondary advantage that you receive fewer emails in future, possibly including emails from your boss.
posted by justsomebodythatyouusedtoknow at 11:28 AM on December 16, 2020 [7 favorites]
Have you tried just ghosting everyone? It has the secondary advantage that you receive fewer emails in future, possibly including emails from your boss.
posted by justsomebodythatyouusedtoknow at 11:28 AM on December 16, 2020 [7 favorites]
I don't get email vacations - even on vacation - and the time of day I may need to look at emails runs from about 6:30am to 10pm (clients in various continents/time zones). This is sort of standard in my industry (B2B financial/legal services) - I don't think I have ever had a vacation where there wasn't some degree of work time, definitely answering some emails, a brief team check-in call almost daily, maybe take one or two longer client calls during the trip. I use a vacation message as a form of triage - everyone gets the 'out of office' bounceback and I peruse my work email periodically, maybe 3 times per day. All of this maybe sounds intrusive and insane and like terrible work-life balance, but the other end of this deal is that I have more or less unlimited paid vacation time/PTO/sick time and am simply expected to be responsible and thoughtful about the timing of vacations and my work hours in general. So with a lot of responsibility to stay connected on vacation, also comes a lot of independence, lack of oversight, privilege etc. I can't fully check out on vacation, but I can go away much more often, take half days often, really prioritize my family ... with half an eye on my email. Earlier in my career the email volume used to get me a little distraught sometimes, but it's become so second nature it no longer stresses me out because I don't have to react to everything. Sometimes emergencies come up while on vacation and that sucks, but usually the company will say comp me a family dinner out that evening or whatever to make up for it.
When I started this career, most clients didn't use email much, documents were faxed or couriered not emailed, and one was SO MUCH MORE chained to the desk. I'll take this over that, for sure.
posted by MustangMamaVE at 11:35 AM on December 16, 2020 [8 favorites]
When I started this career, most clients didn't use email much, documents were faxed or couriered not emailed, and one was SO MUCH MORE chained to the desk. I'll take this over that, for sure.
posted by MustangMamaVE at 11:35 AM on December 16, 2020 [8 favorites]
This is why you catch up on email from newest to oldest. I stole this from somewhere, maybe a comment here, but this way you can watch solved problems fix themselves!
I recall my time at at a previous job in the travel business when part of my responsibility was to answer the general info@_______ e-mail. I was one of five people in the head office, and the only one who did this (save for my vacations, when a colleague grumblingly took it over).
Six years ago I received one sent from an address in Japan to us, a non-profit organization in Canada. It read (verbatim and in full): "hi,im yuki. do you happen to have watermelon picking job in Australia?" I steered Yuki to my Australian counterpart, who might be able to offer suggestions for where to look. I was puzzled by Yuki's approach: if I decided I wanted to work in a café in Denmark, it would not occur to me to write to a tool-and-die business in Paraguay for their help.
A few days later; I opened up the account of a Sunday morning and worked through the questions that had come in overnight; answering this one, forwarding that one and so on. One of the e-mails was an angry complaint as to why no one had bothered to respond to his previous question. I took note of the name but did not recognize it but figured I’d come back in a few minutes after I had dealt with the others. I took care of all the messages as they arrived, so I guessed maybe I had forwarded his message to another office and it had not yet been addressed for whatever reason.
The e-mail system was set up to show most recent first, so I continued to work backward through all the messages that had come in since I had last logged in the night before. A couple of messages beyond the complaint was the previous message from the same guy. He had written an e-mail to an organization’s head office at 1:40 AM on a Sunday and was already demanding a follow-up by 3:15 AM. (He was in the eastern time zone, by the way, as was I, and his question was a general inquiry and not a time-sensitive one.)
I mentioned these e-mails (watermelon inquiries, impatient night owl) to my colleagues over lunch a week later and the marketing person said she would update our e-mail system so an autoresponse would go out guaranteeing someone would get back to the inquiry within ten minutes.
I said it was not feasible for me to stay up the rest of my life monitoring the inbox for watermelon inquiries, and if nothing else, I occasional had meetings that lasted longer than nine minutes. She said that MAYBE we could stretch it to an hour, but no more. I reminded her this was still not feasible unless everyone was taking shifts to answer e-mails. She said, no, it would remain just me, and it had to be an hour tops, but this is what modern business demanded.
Of course, our boss recognized she was demented, but this is one of several reasons I no longer work there.
posted by ricochet biscuit at 11:38 AM on December 16, 2020 [41 favorites]
I recall my time at at a previous job in the travel business when part of my responsibility was to answer the general info@_______ e-mail. I was one of five people in the head office, and the only one who did this (save for my vacations, when a colleague grumblingly took it over).
Six years ago I received one sent from an address in Japan to us, a non-profit organization in Canada. It read (verbatim and in full): "hi,im yuki. do you happen to have watermelon picking job in Australia?" I steered Yuki to my Australian counterpart, who might be able to offer suggestions for where to look. I was puzzled by Yuki's approach: if I decided I wanted to work in a café in Denmark, it would not occur to me to write to a tool-and-die business in Paraguay for their help.
A few days later; I opened up the account of a Sunday morning and worked through the questions that had come in overnight; answering this one, forwarding that one and so on. One of the e-mails was an angry complaint as to why no one had bothered to respond to his previous question. I took note of the name but did not recognize it but figured I’d come back in a few minutes after I had dealt with the others. I took care of all the messages as they arrived, so I guessed maybe I had forwarded his message to another office and it had not yet been addressed for whatever reason.
The e-mail system was set up to show most recent first, so I continued to work backward through all the messages that had come in since I had last logged in the night before. A couple of messages beyond the complaint was the previous message from the same guy. He had written an e-mail to an organization’s head office at 1:40 AM on a Sunday and was already demanding a follow-up by 3:15 AM. (He was in the eastern time zone, by the way, as was I, and his question was a general inquiry and not a time-sensitive one.)
I mentioned these e-mails (watermelon inquiries, impatient night owl) to my colleagues over lunch a week later and the marketing person said she would update our e-mail system so an autoresponse would go out guaranteeing someone would get back to the inquiry within ten minutes.
I said it was not feasible for me to stay up the rest of my life monitoring the inbox for watermelon inquiries, and if nothing else, I occasional had meetings that lasted longer than nine minutes. She said that MAYBE we could stretch it to an hour, but no more. I reminded her this was still not feasible unless everyone was taking shifts to answer e-mails. She said, no, it would remain just me, and it had to be an hour tops, but this is what modern business demanded.
Of course, our boss recognized she was demented, but this is one of several reasons I no longer work there.
posted by ricochet biscuit at 11:38 AM on December 16, 2020 [41 favorites]
yeah, i'm an email checker on vacation. its a hassle not to check. i don't think i'll ever have live/work balance, but it is also sort of awesome to email someone back with a solution to their problem (that was based on not looking at easily accessed documentation), and then signing off with something like, "sorry for the delay, i'm writing this from the saddle below such and such peak up at 10,000 feet, and its the first time i've had a signal in a few days." and then include a photo. this probably also means i'm passive aggressive.
posted by th3ph17 at 11:46 AM on December 16, 2020 [13 favorites]
posted by th3ph17 at 11:46 AM on December 16, 2020 [13 favorites]
This is where I enjoy having a union job (as a teacher). My boyfriend also has a union job (as an electrician). Vacation days are built in to the schedule and there is zero expectation that we'll check our email over the holidays or while we're on vacation.
posted by subdee at 11:48 AM on December 16, 2020 [9 favorites]
posted by subdee at 11:48 AM on December 16, 2020 [9 favorites]
The unexamined privilege of someone without a boss.
I get that, but are we not supposed to write about doing something unless absolutely everybody else can do it too?
posted by JanetLand at 11:49 AM on December 16, 2020 [10 favorites]
I get that, but are we not supposed to write about doing something unless absolutely everybody else can do it too?
posted by JanetLand at 11:49 AM on December 16, 2020 [10 favorites]
OMG I take an immense pleasure in letting someone know I have answered their query from horseback. When I had my horse, I'd often sneak away from my desk during the day, bring my laptop and phone to the barn, and work there - ride, bathe, groom, etc. A nice way to work.
posted by MustangMamaVE at 11:50 AM on December 16, 2020 [3 favorites]
posted by MustangMamaVE at 11:50 AM on December 16, 2020 [3 favorites]
A got a couple of things.
1. If you're talking about emails as a form of oppression, then maybe Cory Doctorow's vacation is not the privilege in this conversation.
2. Some of these anecdotes sound really scary, like, Stockholm Syndrome?
posted by Horkus at 11:52 AM on December 16, 2020 [10 favorites]
1. If you're talking about emails as a form of oppression, then maybe Cory Doctorow's vacation is not the privilege in this conversation.
2. Some of these anecdotes sound really scary, like, Stockholm Syndrome?
posted by Horkus at 11:52 AM on December 16, 2020 [10 favorites]
Speaking as someone who is on the same org chart as Cory at EFF, I think it's okay to reveal that he *definitely* has a one boss. And while I don't have much insight into his finances, I think it's possible to overestimate how much money even a moderately successful author makes.
And speaking as a manager, our hardest challenge is to get people to turn off the info-spigot when they go on vacation. It's good to be able to walk people through it, and a constant struggle to not undermine that advice by setting a bad example.
posted by ntk at 11:52 AM on December 16, 2020 [18 favorites]
And speaking as a manager, our hardest challenge is to get people to turn off the info-spigot when they go on vacation. It's good to be able to walk people through it, and a constant struggle to not undermine that advice by setting a bad example.
posted by ntk at 11:52 AM on December 16, 2020 [18 favorites]
metafilter: why are we still here? just to suffer? every day i get emails
posted by stannate at 11:56 AM on December 16, 2020 [5 favorites]
posted by stannate at 11:56 AM on December 16, 2020 [5 favorites]
It's like snuggling up in Thomas Friedman's moustache clippings
posted by StarkRoads at 11:56 AM on December 16, 2020 [6 favorites]
posted by StarkRoads at 11:56 AM on December 16, 2020 [6 favorites]
"It's like snuggling up in Thomas Friedman's moustache clippings"
I don't really agree, but this is the funniest thing I've read in a month and I'm stealing it.
posted by mecran01 at 11:58 AM on December 16, 2020 [8 favorites]
I don't really agree, but this is the funniest thing I've read in a month and I'm stealing it.
posted by mecran01 at 11:58 AM on December 16, 2020 [8 favorites]
Email is the main way people in my large company communicate. Which means I've had to set up a bunch of filters to kill all the email I don't need to see in the first place, let alone respond to - mostly corporate hype and useless announcements, sales dep't bragging about new customers, etc. I'm fortunately also not expected to monitor email when I'm on vacation, though of course it does accumulate even with all my filters. But I'm still glad to be able to cut way down on my inbox workload so that I can save my usual morning dread for other work-related stuff.
Fun anecdote: A self-important salesperson once IM'd me about a specific technical issue with a new customer, and wondered why I'd never responded to their email. They were quite incensed to learn that I'd filtered out sales-announcement emails (including their own), so I therefore hadn't gotten the less-than-1% of their usual email blather that might have been actually useful to me. They insisted I remove that filter, and I responded that the issue got resolved anyway so what incentive did I have to remove it? They harrumphed a bit but it fell on deaf ears (eyeballs? since this was text?).
I have a bit of a bee in my bonnet about salespeople in general. Clearly they consider themselves the gods of the business; and all others should kneel and kiss their rings, including the support staff, who keeps the shitty software they're constantly overhyping and upselling working for our hapless customers. Bah.
posted by Greg_Ace at 12:05 PM on December 16, 2020 [7 favorites]
Fun anecdote: A self-important salesperson once IM'd me about a specific technical issue with a new customer, and wondered why I'd never responded to their email. They were quite incensed to learn that I'd filtered out sales-announcement emails (including their own), so I therefore hadn't gotten the less-than-1% of their usual email blather that might have been actually useful to me. They insisted I remove that filter, and I responded that the issue got resolved anyway so what incentive did I have to remove it? They harrumphed a bit but it fell on deaf ears (eyeballs? since this was text?).
I have a bit of a bee in my bonnet about salespeople in general. Clearly they consider themselves the gods of the business; and all others should kneel and kiss their rings, including the support staff, who keeps the shitty software they're constantly overhyping and upselling working for our hapless customers. Bah.
posted by Greg_Ace at 12:05 PM on December 16, 2020 [7 favorites]
Preface: I am not a fan of Doctorow.
If you want to not respond to email, just go ahead and not respond and have an autoreply on. Having a big I HEREBY DECLARE EMAIL IS OFF message and a blog post feels like a request for validation and attention when neither is necessary.
posted by hijinx at 12:09 PM on December 16, 2020 [16 favorites]
If you want to not respond to email, just go ahead and not respond and have an autoreply on. Having a big I HEREBY DECLARE EMAIL IS OFF message and a blog post feels like a request for validation and attention when neither is necessary.
posted by hijinx at 12:09 PM on December 16, 2020 [16 favorites]
super super uncomfortable about the tone of this conversation, since it seems to suggest that:
i don't think that individual academics turning off their email for a couple of weeks is necessarily going to change anything, even though obviously people should be able to turn off their email. but also: carping about how you don't get to turn off your email doesn't change anything at all, or rather, all it does is reinforce the toxic, abusive norm that we workers should not be allowed to turn off our email.
i suggest that everyone offended by an academic and an author turning off their emails take it up with their union. after all, things like defending your right to free time away from work (and away from work emails) is precisely the sort of thing that your union is for.
posted by Reclusive Novelist Thomas Pynchon at 12:11 PM on December 16, 2020 [43 favorites]
- the normative practices around workplace email in many industries are flatly abusive, and that
- doing anything to evade the abuse is an expression of privilege.
i don't think that individual academics turning off their email for a couple of weeks is necessarily going to change anything, even though obviously people should be able to turn off their email. but also: carping about how you don't get to turn off your email doesn't change anything at all, or rather, all it does is reinforce the toxic, abusive norm that we workers should not be allowed to turn off our email.
i suggest that everyone offended by an academic and an author turning off their emails take it up with their union. after all, things like defending your right to free time away from work (and away from work emails) is precisely the sort of thing that your union is for.
posted by Reclusive Novelist Thomas Pynchon at 12:11 PM on December 16, 2020 [43 favorites]
Already kinda mentioned above, but the best filters are sorting "to" and cc/distros into their own piles. Keep direct to you emails at the top somewhere, sort everything else into as large of buckets as you can and only pull out super important distros/senders as-needed. I also moved those few folders into my favorites and collapsed the main view. As an obsessive "unread number smasher", this strategy has provided a huge cognitive relief. Having less folder clutter in view has also helped with obsessively reading (ie, marking read) each email as they arrive.
I guess that's a little off-topic, but I figured anything that might help someone out after this year is probably worth mentioning.
posted by Godspeed.You!Black.Emperor.Penguin at 12:15 PM on December 16, 2020 [4 favorites]
I guess that's a little off-topic, but I figured anything that might help someone out after this year is probably worth mentioning.
posted by Godspeed.You!Black.Emperor.Penguin at 12:15 PM on December 16, 2020 [4 favorites]
1. If you're talking about emails as a form of oppression, then maybe Cory Doctorow's vacation is not the privilege in this conversation.
2. Some of these anecdotes sound really scary, like, Stockholm Syndrome?
I sort of find these two statements really inherently contradictory. Consideration of email responsibilities as a heavy burden is a sign of privilege, but shouldering that burden willingly is a sign of trauma/identification with captors? Do you think you could re-articulate what you mean because as written it sounds like just invalidating either end of the spectrum of opinions on one's own email responsibilities. The accusation of Stockholm Syndrome is reading to me as if you don't consider someone to be a reliable reporter of their own experiences around email but, like, why? Maybe I am taking an offhand comment too seriously/personally.
(Personally I would absolutely agree that my relationship to email is the first end, a privilege. Working a job that is physically safe, allows me the freedom of control over my hours, provides great benefits, home with my kids, but the "burden" is a lot of emails ... seems yes quite privileged for me in the circumstances in which I, personally, live it. Like, the emails are the smallest price to pay, for me.)
posted by MustangMamaVE at 12:15 PM on December 16, 2020
2. Some of these anecdotes sound really scary, like, Stockholm Syndrome?
I sort of find these two statements really inherently contradictory. Consideration of email responsibilities as a heavy burden is a sign of privilege, but shouldering that burden willingly is a sign of trauma/identification with captors? Do you think you could re-articulate what you mean because as written it sounds like just invalidating either end of the spectrum of opinions on one's own email responsibilities. The accusation of Stockholm Syndrome is reading to me as if you don't consider someone to be a reliable reporter of their own experiences around email but, like, why? Maybe I am taking an offhand comment too seriously/personally.
(Personally I would absolutely agree that my relationship to email is the first end, a privilege. Working a job that is physically safe, allows me the freedom of control over my hours, provides great benefits, home with my kids, but the "burden" is a lot of emails ... seems yes quite privileged for me in the circumstances in which I, personally, live it. Like, the emails are the smallest price to pay, for me.)
posted by MustangMamaVE at 12:15 PM on December 16, 2020
Preface: I am not a fan of Doctorow.
well there's a surprise
posted by thelonius at 12:19 PM on December 16, 2020 [2 favorites]
well there's a surprise
posted by thelonius at 12:19 PM on December 16, 2020 [2 favorites]
I don't respond after 5 p.m./on vacation, but I know darned well for every one day I am out, that's another two workdays of just dealing with email. I nth that this is a level of privilege most of us cannot do, especially with regular employers.
I was puzzled by Yuki's approach: if I decided I wanted to work in a café in Denmark, it would not occur to me to write to a tool-and-die business in Paraguay for their help.
That is the most inexplicable one I have ever seen, and yet seems also typical of well, the international crowd.
Weirdest ones at my job, which unfortunately people think is The Giant Catchall Office That Does Everything:
(a) When I used to answer the general phone line, someone called asking a question related to my volunteer job, which really wasn't related AT ALL to this office. I said "You're lucky you got me, because no one else here would know that, but really you should have called them. Also, no, you can't do that."
(b) A coworker of mine got someone calling saying they thought their appendix burst. Coworker: "HANG UP AND CALL 911." Person: "Can you transfer me to a medical office?" Coworker: "No, I am going to hang up SO YOU CAN CALL 911."
posted by jenfullmoon at 12:19 PM on December 16, 2020 [1 favorite]
I was puzzled by Yuki's approach: if I decided I wanted to work in a café in Denmark, it would not occur to me to write to a tool-and-die business in Paraguay for their help.
That is the most inexplicable one I have ever seen, and yet seems also typical of well, the international crowd.
Weirdest ones at my job, which unfortunately people think is The Giant Catchall Office That Does Everything:
(a) When I used to answer the general phone line, someone called asking a question related to my volunteer job, which really wasn't related AT ALL to this office. I said "You're lucky you got me, because no one else here would know that, but really you should have called them. Also, no, you can't do that."
(b) A coworker of mine got someone calling saying they thought their appendix burst. Coworker: "HANG UP AND CALL 911." Person: "Can you transfer me to a medical office?" Coworker: "No, I am going to hang up SO YOU CAN CALL 911."
posted by jenfullmoon at 12:19 PM on December 16, 2020 [1 favorite]
The unexamined privilege of someone without a boss. But hey, Danah Boyd and Cory Doctorow are prime examples of people who pretty much don't understand how out of touch they are.
Came here for the slam on Cory Doctorow. Was not disappointed.
posted by slogger at 12:34 PM on December 16, 2020 [2 favorites]
Came here for the slam on Cory Doctorow. Was not disappointed.
posted by slogger at 12:34 PM on December 16, 2020 [2 favorites]
Disclosure: Cory and I are really good friends.
Cory's talking about something I do pretty frequently -- when I'm on vacation, when I'm on tour or when I'm on a book deadline I will both announce publicly that I'm avoiding email (and/or social media), and I'll put on an auto-responder letting people know I'm away and will probably not be reading their mail. When I do this I usually let people know at what date I'll return so they can resend email if they think it's important, and I set up a whitelist for emails I will actually respond to.
Why do I announce this stuff publicly? Well, because to some extent I am a public individual and if I don't make an announcement I'll get people wondering if I have fallen down a well. You may think this is a joke but it's actually a thing; if I'm not around people worry. They should not worry, and it's not their responsibility to worry, but you know how people are. If I publicly announce an absence, then people know ahead of time, and if someone has missed the announcement, someone else will tell them if they worry out loud what happened to me. Yes, this is weird. But inasmuch as it exists, then making note of an intended absence is a courtesy.
Is it a privilege to be able to ignore email? I suppose it is but it really shouldn't be; in a better world than we have vacations should mean vacations -- and I believe in other countries (my brain wants to say Germany or France) it's actually not legal to require workers to stay in email contact during their time off. It's certainly true that I don't have a boss and also that I can just ignore email and not suffer for it; I recognize other people don't (or don't feel) they have that same ability. I'm not going to feel bad about having that ability, however.
Nor would I feel particularly bad about mentioning it as one of my time-management strategies; it might not be useful or practical for some people for whatever reason, but it might useful to others. As they say on the internet, your mileage may vary. It's absolutely valid, when considering what I say (in this or any other matter) to take into account who I am and my station in life, and also, I think it's axiomatic that when it comes to life/time/career/whatever tips, one size might not fit all.
posted by jscalzi at 12:41 PM on December 16, 2020 [39 favorites]
Cory's talking about something I do pretty frequently -- when I'm on vacation, when I'm on tour or when I'm on a book deadline I will both announce publicly that I'm avoiding email (and/or social media), and I'll put on an auto-responder letting people know I'm away and will probably not be reading their mail. When I do this I usually let people know at what date I'll return so they can resend email if they think it's important, and I set up a whitelist for emails I will actually respond to.
Why do I announce this stuff publicly? Well, because to some extent I am a public individual and if I don't make an announcement I'll get people wondering if I have fallen down a well. You may think this is a joke but it's actually a thing; if I'm not around people worry. They should not worry, and it's not their responsibility to worry, but you know how people are. If I publicly announce an absence, then people know ahead of time, and if someone has missed the announcement, someone else will tell them if they worry out loud what happened to me. Yes, this is weird. But inasmuch as it exists, then making note of an intended absence is a courtesy.
Is it a privilege to be able to ignore email? I suppose it is but it really shouldn't be; in a better world than we have vacations should mean vacations -- and I believe in other countries (my brain wants to say Germany or France) it's actually not legal to require workers to stay in email contact during their time off. It's certainly true that I don't have a boss and also that I can just ignore email and not suffer for it; I recognize other people don't (or don't feel) they have that same ability. I'm not going to feel bad about having that ability, however.
Nor would I feel particularly bad about mentioning it as one of my time-management strategies; it might not be useful or practical for some people for whatever reason, but it might useful to others. As they say on the internet, your mileage may vary. It's absolutely valid, when considering what I say (in this or any other matter) to take into account who I am and my station in life, and also, I think it's axiomatic that when it comes to life/time/career/whatever tips, one size might not fit all.
posted by jscalzi at 12:41 PM on December 16, 2020 [39 favorites]
I did not know that Cory Doctorow was dealing with such a serious chronic health issue; mecran01, if nothing else, thanks for posting this so that I came across that info.
I'm self-employed and, if I made plans early enough, I believe that I would be able to do this kind of email sabbatical, and I'd like to do it for my next multiweek vacation. (I haven't taken one since 2014 and don't know when that next one will be.) I appreciated boyd's example when I saw it a few years ago, and I appreciate Doctorow talking about it and helping point out that this is something that a person could possibly do. Every time I see someone draw a boundary like this, protecting their health, it helps remind me that yes, it can be okay to protect my health, too.
For disclosure: he and I know each other a bit, but clearly not very well since I was surprised to hear of the health issue.
posted by brainwane at 12:45 PM on December 16, 2020 [3 favorites]
I'm self-employed and, if I made plans early enough, I believe that I would be able to do this kind of email sabbatical, and I'd like to do it for my next multiweek vacation. (I haven't taken one since 2014 and don't know when that next one will be.) I appreciated boyd's example when I saw it a few years ago, and I appreciate Doctorow talking about it and helping point out that this is something that a person could possibly do. Every time I see someone draw a boundary like this, protecting their health, it helps remind me that yes, it can be okay to protect my health, too.
For disclosure: he and I know each other a bit, but clearly not very well since I was surprised to hear of the health issue.
posted by brainwane at 12:45 PM on December 16, 2020 [3 favorites]
I think an out-of-the-office auto response is sufficient. I can't imagine the sheer hassle of going through unsubscribing to things, telling people not to e-mail me, coming back and kicking everything into gear again.
Even unwanted and deleted e-mail has a place. Just a few minutes ago, I got finished digging through my work e-mail's deleted box (which currently contains 17,566 messages) because a colleague needed help with something. I knew there was likely to be something useful in that deleted pile, even if I hadn't thought those messages where of value when I first read them. Sure enough, I sent her four or five previously deleted messages with that hopes that one or two would provide the kind of lead she needs.
Just last week I had considered permanently wiping out the messages sitting in that deleted folder but I held off. Now, I'm glad I did. I'm sure eventually, I'll have to take that step and wipe the folder clean (likely when I hit my storage limit), but once that happens, I'll let it build up again because I know there will be another time when I'll find myself needing to do a (metaphorical) dumpster dive for information.
posted by sardonyx at 12:58 PM on December 16, 2020 [4 favorites]
Even unwanted and deleted e-mail has a place. Just a few minutes ago, I got finished digging through my work e-mail's deleted box (which currently contains 17,566 messages) because a colleague needed help with something. I knew there was likely to be something useful in that deleted pile, even if I hadn't thought those messages where of value when I first read them. Sure enough, I sent her four or five previously deleted messages with that hopes that one or two would provide the kind of lead she needs.
Just last week I had considered permanently wiping out the messages sitting in that deleted folder but I held off. Now, I'm glad I did. I'm sure eventually, I'll have to take that step and wipe the folder clean (likely when I hit my storage limit), but once that happens, I'll let it build up again because I know there will be another time when I'll find myself needing to do a (metaphorical) dumpster dive for information.
posted by sardonyx at 12:58 PM on December 16, 2020 [4 favorites]
One of the marked differences you notice between North American and European working habits is that North Americans say, I'm on vacation so I'll only be checking my mail once a day, I'll periodically check slack, you can reach my at this phone number in an emergency, and Europeans say, like, for the month of July I am unavailable. And I've gotta say, the European approach is superior.
Netflix, for years, has had this idea of the "Chaos Monkey" - a tool they deploy in their production services that "is responsible for randomly terminating instances in production to ensure that engineers implement their services to be resilient to instance failures." If you work there, you know in your bones that wherever your code lives and whatever it's doing, it doesn't matter how important it is, at any given moment this instruction you're running might be your last, and you'd better be able to deal with that.
I've been unsuccessfully campaigning for an HR Chaos Monkey at my job for years. Surprise, your chief engineer now has two weeks of involuntary time off. No email, no LDAP, nothing. They're Capital-G Gone, just like they might have been if they'd been hit by a car, poached by a competitor or just quit. If your project is not robust in the face of that kind of failure, then your project is exposed to a risk you haven't planned for, and that's a failure of management.
Even in an organization with lots of management structure and zero people who are their own bosses, if somebody _can't_ take a vacation because a project might fail? That project is already in trouble.
posted by mhoye at 1:04 PM on December 16, 2020 [81 favorites]
Netflix, for years, has had this idea of the "Chaos Monkey" - a tool they deploy in their production services that "is responsible for randomly terminating instances in production to ensure that engineers implement their services to be resilient to instance failures." If you work there, you know in your bones that wherever your code lives and whatever it's doing, it doesn't matter how important it is, at any given moment this instruction you're running might be your last, and you'd better be able to deal with that.
I've been unsuccessfully campaigning for an HR Chaos Monkey at my job for years. Surprise, your chief engineer now has two weeks of involuntary time off. No email, no LDAP, nothing. They're Capital-G Gone, just like they might have been if they'd been hit by a car, poached by a competitor or just quit. If your project is not robust in the face of that kind of failure, then your project is exposed to a risk you haven't planned for, and that's a failure of management.
Even in an organization with lots of management structure and zero people who are their own bosses, if somebody _can't_ take a vacation because a project might fail? That project is already in trouble.
posted by mhoye at 1:04 PM on December 16, 2020 [81 favorites]
Came here for the slam on Cory Doctorow. Was not disappointed.
Full disclosure: I am a fan -- I like most of his fiction, and his advocacy, to a first order, aligns with goals that I agree with.
But that doesn't mean that this whole blog post wasn't just an autoresponder with a lot of extra steps. Notifying people you'll be out? Good professional form. Sending a reminder? Same.
Memory-holing emails that arrive during your self-described sabbatical? Out of touch, and not aware of it.
As I said, I am a fan of Doctorow, but I also feel like his adoption of a specific method that would be dangerous for anyone who isn't at his high level of notoriety and influence is awful close to reinventing the wheel for no good reason other than to demonstrate that he can get away with it.
posted by tclark at 1:07 PM on December 16, 2020 [4 favorites]
Full disclosure: I am a fan -- I like most of his fiction, and his advocacy, to a first order, aligns with goals that I agree with.
But that doesn't mean that this whole blog post wasn't just an autoresponder with a lot of extra steps. Notifying people you'll be out? Good professional form. Sending a reminder? Same.
Memory-holing emails that arrive during your self-described sabbatical? Out of touch, and not aware of it.
As I said, I am a fan of Doctorow, but I also feel like his adoption of a specific method that would be dangerous for anyone who isn't at his high level of notoriety and influence is awful close to reinventing the wheel for no good reason other than to demonstrate that he can get away with it.
posted by tclark at 1:07 PM on December 16, 2020 [4 favorites]
I think Doctorow talks in the post about why he is adopting this specific method (his health being heavily affected by stress, and how an email backlog hanging overhead makes it a lot harder to actually relax during a vacation), and how he does this responsibly (by ensuring all the people who depend on him have clear expectations ahead of time), and why he is writing publicly about it (to highlight danah boyd's insight and to "show you a bit of the blooper reel").
I do ask people in this thread to be careful about how you describe or criticize someone who is writing about making an accommodation for a disabling health condition.
posted by brainwane at 1:21 PM on December 16, 2020 [12 favorites]
I do ask people in this thread to be careful about how you describe or criticize someone who is writing about making an accommodation for a disabling health condition.
posted by brainwane at 1:21 PM on December 16, 2020 [12 favorites]
Her name is danah boyd, all lowercase.
Narrator: This is danah.
Steph: But when we stop reading emails, we have no names.
Narrator: No, listen to me. This is a person and she has a name, and it's danah boyd okay?
Mechanic: danah boyd.
Narrator: She has stopped reading email now, because of us, all right? You understand that?
[Everyone stares at Narrator]
Mechanic: I understand. When we turn off email, we have a name. Her name is danah boyd.
Steph: Her name is danah boyd.
Narrator: Stop it! Shut up!
etc…
posted by Insert Clever Name Here at 1:23 PM on December 16, 2020 [5 favorites]
Narrator: This is danah.
Steph: But when we stop reading emails, we have no names.
Narrator: No, listen to me. This is a person and she has a name, and it's danah boyd okay?
Mechanic: danah boyd.
Narrator: She has stopped reading email now, because of us, all right? You understand that?
[Everyone stares at Narrator]
Mechanic: I understand. When we turn off email, we have a name. Her name is danah boyd.
Steph: Her name is danah boyd.
Narrator: Stop it! Shut up!
etc…
posted by Insert Clever Name Here at 1:23 PM on December 16, 2020 [5 favorites]
From reading the comments here I was expecting Cory to be framing the article in a self-help sort of way. On reading it, he's just saying that his friend does this and he's decided to try it out for himself because he thinks he needs it for himself, and the alternatives (coming back to a pile of email to triage) don't work for him. He's not telling any of us that we should be doing it.
I have seen that one of the problems of being one's own boss is the extra difficulty of stepping away. He doesn't have any teammates to pick up the work when he's off on vacation. His opportunities and success in work are probably directly correlated with his ability to make and maintain relationships, and email is a huge part of that in our current contact-minimizing situation. I'm sure he is acutely aware of the tradeoff he is making by turning off his email for 3 weeks or so.
jscalzi touched upon the expectations placed upon people with any sort of fame, and get the desire to make a public announcement instead of just popping up an autoresponder.
posted by that girl at 1:24 PM on December 16, 2020 [6 favorites]
I have seen that one of the problems of being one's own boss is the extra difficulty of stepping away. He doesn't have any teammates to pick up the work when he's off on vacation. His opportunities and success in work are probably directly correlated with his ability to make and maintain relationships, and email is a huge part of that in our current contact-minimizing situation. I'm sure he is acutely aware of the tradeoff he is making by turning off his email for 3 weeks or so.
jscalzi touched upon the expectations placed upon people with any sort of fame, and get the desire to make a public announcement instead of just popping up an autoresponder.
posted by that girl at 1:24 PM on December 16, 2020 [6 favorites]
it's possible to overestimate how much money even a moderately successful author makes
From above, and no kidding. Some moderately successful authors consider themselves moderately successfully just because they can make their rent, if not much more.
Coping strategies are great and necessary, but they're no substitute for addressing the underlying problems. I'm proud of the work I do, but I'm also still learning how to do it right. From TFA.
Jeepers, what a bunch of cranky pants today. I didn't get any serious attitude vibes from the article but there's a bunch of attitude in this thread. I don't know Cory Doctorow but I have read the article and cannot find the part where he sneeringly dismisses all the little people who cannot take an email vacation. (Also, what brainwane said.)
Doctorow does end the piece with a modest acknowledgement that he's not perfect. If the guy's system is not your thing, maybe don't use it. I don't understand the hostility that this post has provoked among some. So in parting, I will share a slogan popular in Al-Anon, the fellowship for the friends and relatives of alcoholics: Take what you like, and leave the rest. Be well, all.
posted by Bella Donna at 1:25 PM on December 16, 2020 [11 favorites]
From above, and no kidding. Some moderately successful authors consider themselves moderately successfully just because they can make their rent, if not much more.
Coping strategies are great and necessary, but they're no substitute for addressing the underlying problems. I'm proud of the work I do, but I'm also still learning how to do it right. From TFA.
Jeepers, what a bunch of cranky pants today. I didn't get any serious attitude vibes from the article but there's a bunch of attitude in this thread. I don't know Cory Doctorow but I have read the article and cannot find the part where he sneeringly dismisses all the little people who cannot take an email vacation. (Also, what brainwane said.)
Doctorow does end the piece with a modest acknowledgement that he's not perfect. If the guy's system is not your thing, maybe don't use it. I don't understand the hostility that this post has provoked among some. So in parting, I will share a slogan popular in Al-Anon, the fellowship for the friends and relatives of alcoholics: Take what you like, and leave the rest. Be well, all.
posted by Bella Donna at 1:25 PM on December 16, 2020 [11 favorites]
It just seems... a little self-important. Just turn on your vacation responder with a message that says "I'm on vacation until X date. For work inquiries email Y@whereever. If you need a personal response from me, email again after X date, as this email will not be seen." If you are bizarrely committed to a blank email inbox, then set up a filter to auto-delete. People go on vacation all the time, without having to lecture people about it six months ahead or make blog posts about a simple two step process.
posted by tavella at 1:29 PM on December 16, 2020 [8 favorites]
posted by tavella at 1:29 PM on December 16, 2020 [8 favorites]
bxvr: "I’m gonna send a company wide email that they can’t talk to me"
Please make sure you cc everyone, that way I can "reply all" and we can play out-of-office pong for the rest of the day!
posted by chavenet at 1:33 PM on December 16, 2020 [3 favorites]
Please make sure you cc everyone, that way I can "reply all" and we can play out-of-office pong for the rest of the day!
posted by chavenet at 1:33 PM on December 16, 2020 [3 favorites]
It just seems... a little self-important. Just turn on your vacation responder with a message that says "I'm on vacation until X date. For work inquiries email Y@whereever. If you need a personal response from me, email again after X date, as this email will not be seen." If you are bizarrely committed to a blank email inbox, then set up a filter to auto-delete. People go on vacation all the time, without having to lecture people about it six months ahead or make blog posts about a simple two step process.
I think this is saying more about you than it is about the article. There's no lecturing, nothing prescriptive in there. Blog posts are not some zero sum thing, this one existing isn't hurting anyone. Also do not understand the weirdly hostile and defensive reaction that this article is engendering for some reason.
posted by lazaruslong at 1:34 PM on December 16, 2020 [2 favorites]
I think this is saying more about you than it is about the article. There's no lecturing, nothing prescriptive in there. Blog posts are not some zero sum thing, this one existing isn't hurting anyone. Also do not understand the weirdly hostile and defensive reaction that this article is engendering for some reason.
posted by lazaruslong at 1:34 PM on December 16, 2020 [2 favorites]
Also do not understand the weirdly hostile and defensive reaction that this article is engendering for some reason.
An awful lot of people don't feel like they have any agency over their professional lives, resent that feeling, and reflexively resent people who claim they do. You can pick them out pretty clearly in this thread.
posted by mhoye at 1:56 PM on December 16, 2020 [11 favorites]
An awful lot of people don't feel like they have any agency over their professional lives, resent that feeling, and reflexively resent people who claim they do. You can pick them out pretty clearly in this thread.
posted by mhoye at 1:56 PM on December 16, 2020 [11 favorites]
I'm not a public figure, so I would never need to formalize things in this way (I just put up an autoreply and passive-aggressively fail to fully catch up on everything when I get back because...I have a phone and if it's that important someone will call and follow up), but man, I absolutely 100% understand the process behind this. I'm sure it says more about me than anyone else that a day in which I'm dealing with work stuff is a day in which I am at least partially clenched like a full-body fist, but I have found doing work on vacation to be SO destructive to my mental health, to the point that we started doing things like taking trips to more and more isolated places just so I wouldn't even be able to open Pandora's box if I tried. Because I HAVE TRIED. I have filed regulatory comments from the gates of a national park. The older I get the more I feel like smartphones and constant connectedness are a plague. The whole point of a vacation is to have an uninterrupted stretch of time for my brain to rest and for people to stop asking me hard questions. Those unions in Europe have the right idea.
Besides, if I dropped dead tomorrow, I wouldn't be responding to email and presumably everyone would find some way to carry on without me with only mild inconvenience.
posted by bowtiesarecool at 2:00 PM on December 16, 2020 [5 favorites]
Besides, if I dropped dead tomorrow, I wouldn't be responding to email and presumably everyone would find some way to carry on without me with only mild inconvenience.
posted by bowtiesarecool at 2:00 PM on December 16, 2020 [5 favorites]
I think that if the hostility of some responses is baffling to people, consider that a huge number of Americans (I can only speak to an American job experience here) are told that they are lucky to have jobs at all and that the most basic ability to set some boundaries would result in the loss of that job. Add to that the culture of “workplace wellness” and “burnout prevention training,” both of which emphasize that any dissatisfaction you feel with a toxic workplace is your own fault and you should try harder to drink more water, because Wellness Solves Everything.
I’m glad that there are people in situations where they can set some boundaries with work and even gladder that there are entire countries where it’s not expected that work will rule every waking hour of your existence. Just maybe keep in mind that turning off email is an unimaginable luxury for a lot of people and sometimes reading an article about one more basic protection that you don’t have can be the straw that breaks the camel’s back.
posted by corey flood at 2:02 PM on December 16, 2020 [12 favorites]
I’m glad that there are people in situations where they can set some boundaries with work and even gladder that there are entire countries where it’s not expected that work will rule every waking hour of your existence. Just maybe keep in mind that turning off email is an unimaginable luxury for a lot of people and sometimes reading an article about one more basic protection that you don’t have can be the straw that breaks the camel’s back.
posted by corey flood at 2:02 PM on December 16, 2020 [12 favorites]
So the tl;dr here is autodeleting all your email when you're on vacation?
This is barely fortune cookie material much less essay material.
I thought maybe she was going email-free for a few weeks while still at work, going off to do some visionquesting or something, which seem like a bold move to not answer emails while on the clock, but even in the year of our perpetual drudgery 2020 turning off your email while on vacation isn't some radical throwing-shoes-into-the-machines move.
posted by GuyZero at 2:08 PM on December 16, 2020 [4 favorites]
This is barely fortune cookie material much less essay material.
I thought maybe she was going email-free for a few weeks while still at work, going off to do some visionquesting or something, which seem like a bold move to not answer emails while on the clock, but even in the year of our perpetual drudgery 2020 turning off your email while on vacation isn't some radical throwing-shoes-into-the-machines move.
posted by GuyZero at 2:08 PM on December 16, 2020 [4 favorites]
Doctorow does end the piece with a modest acknowledgement that he's not perfect.
Overtly acknowledging that you're not perfect is not modest.
posted by Cardinal Fang at 2:08 PM on December 16, 2020 [2 favorites]
Overtly acknowledging that you're not perfect is not modest.
posted by Cardinal Fang at 2:08 PM on December 16, 2020 [2 favorites]
Overtly acknowledging that you're not perfect is not modest.
well, no one's perfect.
posted by GuyZero at 2:10 PM on December 16, 2020 [13 favorites]
well, no one's perfect.
posted by GuyZero at 2:10 PM on December 16, 2020 [13 favorites]
Boss (who likes me) : I am going on holiday. Please don't contact me unless it's an absolute emergency.
Me : Don't worry. I won't contact you even then.
posted by Cardinal Fang at 2:19 PM on December 16, 2020 [5 favorites]
Me : Don't worry. I won't contact you even then.
posted by Cardinal Fang at 2:19 PM on December 16, 2020 [5 favorites]
I've been unsuccessfully campaigning for an HR Chaos Monkey at my job for years. Surprise, your chief engineer now has two weeks of involuntary time off. No email, no LDAP, nothing. They're Capital-G Gone, just like they might have been if they'd been hit by a car, poached by a competitor or just quit. If your project is not robust in the face of that kind of failure, then your project is exposed to a risk you haven't planned for, and that's a failure of management.
That's kind of like mandatory vacation policies for finance and IT folks, aimed at disrupting cover-ups of any internal fraud or embezzlement that require constant work to hide.
posted by bassooner at 2:21 PM on December 16, 2020 [22 favorites]
That's kind of like mandatory vacation policies for finance and IT folks, aimed at disrupting cover-ups of any internal fraud or embezzlement that require constant work to hide.
posted by bassooner at 2:21 PM on December 16, 2020 [22 favorites]
I do feel like this blog post is a bit off.
Mostly because it makes such a big deal about not responding to emails (and deleting them) that it kind of implies that the norm is not just to Answer Email Constantly, but to stress out when you get back from a vacation and you are behind on email and you have to answer all of them at once.
I've definitely felt that stress, but as a wise person who reported to me once said, the more I got into a tizzy about What Will Happen When I'm Not Answering Email, the more the message to my staff was Thou Shalt Worry About Email.
A way of normalizing a healthy relationship to email would be "hey guys, thanks for worrying about me and also sending me last minute opportunities/inquiries/press opportunities, but I have had a really tough year and I will be on vacation for a month." Then set your autoresponder and filters up to suit yourself, and so they explain to people what you are doing so they know they won't ever get an answer, and move on.
That said, I think it actually does reflect the space that he's in right now which sounds awful and adrenalized and I'm glad that whatever he says about it, he's about to do it.
posted by warriorqueen at 2:22 PM on December 16, 2020 [4 favorites]
Mostly because it makes such a big deal about not responding to emails (and deleting them) that it kind of implies that the norm is not just to Answer Email Constantly, but to stress out when you get back from a vacation and you are behind on email and you have to answer all of them at once.
I've definitely felt that stress, but as a wise person who reported to me once said, the more I got into a tizzy about What Will Happen When I'm Not Answering Email, the more the message to my staff was Thou Shalt Worry About Email.
A way of normalizing a healthy relationship to email would be "hey guys, thanks for worrying about me and also sending me last minute opportunities/inquiries/press opportunities, but I have had a really tough year and I will be on vacation for a month." Then set your autoresponder and filters up to suit yourself, and so they explain to people what you are doing so they know they won't ever get an answer, and move on.
That said, I think it actually does reflect the space that he's in right now which sounds awful and adrenalized and I'm glad that whatever he says about it, he's about to do it.
posted by warriorqueen at 2:22 PM on December 16, 2020 [4 favorites]
Re-reading this Doctorow comes across more like he's trying to talk himself off the ledge of obsessive overwork and convince himself to take a break. It's less proscriptive and more confessional. And I get that people are not totally sympathetic to the confessional writing of workaholic people (oh! I work too hard! so much winning! woe is me!) but eh, like he says, going all-out works in the short term but not in the long term.
posted by GuyZero at 2:23 PM on December 16, 2020 [5 favorites]
posted by GuyZero at 2:23 PM on December 16, 2020 [5 favorites]
I think an awful lot of people don't like Cory Doctorow and knee-jerked this blog post to hell and back. I hope he has a relaxing, real vacation and comes back feeling better than ever.
posted by muddgirl at 2:24 PM on December 16, 2020 [7 favorites]
posted by muddgirl at 2:24 PM on December 16, 2020 [7 favorites]
Mostly because it makes such a big deal about not responding to emails (and deleting them) that it kind of implies that the norm is not just to Answer Email Constantly, but to stress out when you get back from a vacation and you are behind on email and you have to answer all of them at once.
If every email you receive requires an answer then the first email ever sent to two recipients demarked the end of human civilization. Which I suppose is a case you could make, but the realization that asking a question doesn’t entitle you to an answer is I think an important one for many reasons, sanity and health near the top of the list.
posted by mhoye at 2:31 PM on December 16, 2020 [2 favorites]
If every email you receive requires an answer then the first email ever sent to two recipients demarked the end of human civilization. Which I suppose is a case you could make, but the realization that asking a question doesn’t entitle you to an answer is I think an important one for many reasons, sanity and health near the top of the list.
posted by mhoye at 2:31 PM on December 16, 2020 [2 favorites]
Just maybe keep in mind that turning off email is an unimaginable luxury for a lot of people and sometimes reading an article about one more basic protection that you don’t have can be the straw that breaks the camel’s back.
The FPPed link is probably not a good starting place for a discussion of work-life balance, whether or not it intends to — that isn't so clear. But when more people are working from home, and especially because of a global pandemic, it has certainly changed what notions of "vacation" and "turning off" mean for people who are fortunate enough to still have employment. It would be great to have interesting and insightful takes on that, particularly with how work life now intersects with home space in directly physical and mental ways, by writers who might have some actual understanding and experience with that, within the hierarchies most of us live within.
posted by They sucked his brains out! at 2:31 PM on December 16, 2020 [2 favorites]
The FPPed link is probably not a good starting place for a discussion of work-life balance, whether or not it intends to — that isn't so clear. But when more people are working from home, and especially because of a global pandemic, it has certainly changed what notions of "vacation" and "turning off" mean for people who are fortunate enough to still have employment. It would be great to have interesting and insightful takes on that, particularly with how work life now intersects with home space in directly physical and mental ways, by writers who might have some actual understanding and experience with that, within the hierarchies most of us live within.
posted by They sucked his brains out! at 2:31 PM on December 16, 2020 [2 favorites]
okay so to all the other writers on this thread who feel an obligation to keep their readers posted on their whereabouts and doings, who for that reason think they can't just step away from their email whenever they want:
there is another way.
posted by Reclusive Novelist Thomas Pynchon at 2:43 PM on December 16, 2020 [8 favorites]
there is another way.
posted by Reclusive Novelist Thomas Pynchon at 2:43 PM on December 16, 2020 [8 favorites]
...I've gotta say, the European approach is superior.
I find that this is true about almost everything.
posted by freakazoid at 2:47 PM on December 16, 2020 [5 favorites]
I find that this is true about almost everything.
posted by freakazoid at 2:47 PM on December 16, 2020 [5 favorites]
I've got a serious, untreatable, degenerating chronic pain condition, and working is how I hope with the pain, too – distraction works far better than any prescription meds for me.
But ignoring your body's pain signals is a dangerous tactic. It's why I'm now experiencing the worst continuous pain of my adult life (it's been a stressful year). Last week it was so bad I was walking with a cane [...]
I've spent most of the year with sores at the corners of my mouth, which I only get under in the most extreme times of stress.
Doctorow displays vulnerability by discussing why he’s talking an email sabbatical. I think we should hate the system that produces an always available culture, not the few people who are able to escape it.
posted by mundo at 2:59 PM on December 16, 2020 [4 favorites]
But ignoring your body's pain signals is a dangerous tactic. It's why I'm now experiencing the worst continuous pain of my adult life (it's been a stressful year). Last week it was so bad I was walking with a cane [...]
I've spent most of the year with sores at the corners of my mouth, which I only get under in the most extreme times of stress.
Doctorow displays vulnerability by discussing why he’s talking an email sabbatical. I think we should hate the system that produces an always available culture, not the few people who are able to escape it.
posted by mundo at 2:59 PM on December 16, 2020 [4 favorites]
There are two different approaches to sources of data, and they map roughly to the two opposing list models of LIFO and FIFO, or queues and stacks.
For decades, we treated most data on the Internet/UUCP networks as queues. Data would come in via e-mail or Usenet or something, and you would go through it in chronological order until you were "caught up". Replies went below quoted blocks of text, and newer data sorted to the bottom of an index screen.
But when "blogs" started to become popular, they did an astonishing thing: they put newer data at the top of the feed, forcing you to read in reverse-chronological order. This was hard to get used to, if your blog was a serial novel or a multi-part series, but authors were aware of this and would say "this is part three of a multi-part series. If you haven't read part one yet, the link is here..."
And that's because data had suddenly switched from being a queue of data you had to complete your consumption of, to a stack of information you could pop down for as long as you had time or attention for. It didn't matter if you missed something, because there was so much bursting out of the firehose that you only ever sampled occasional moments in time to find out new things you were interested in.
Modern systems tend to mix these, showing top-level items in LIFO/stack order (like FPPs), and targeted replies to these items in FIFO/queue order (like this very comment you are reading now). Some of this mixing confuses people (consider the traditions on Twitter of calling out when a tweet is part of a longer queue-structured thread), but it seems to be the way we interact with data now.
I have old 1990s-style e-mail sorting that filters data into multiple inboxes. Some is from automatic sources, or comes from large groups of people or otherwise is high-volume content that I don't need to follow completely. That stuff is "stack" mail I can poke through occasionally and periodically flush with a clear conscience. But some inboxes are things I have Responsibility for, and they are "queue" mail I need to grind through methodically and make sure I never drop a stitch.
I am glad that I work somewhere that has moved most conversations to discourse or mattermost conversations, where these distinctions are rather explicit. It makes it easier to say "I won't read anything I'm not explicitly tagged into" and focus on something else as necessary.
But really, we should accept that e-mail should be relegated to "stack" data. Young people I know already only treat e-mail as "that place I seem to need to go for password resets sometimes."
posted by rum-soaked space hobo at 3:00 PM on December 16, 2020 [3 favorites]
For decades, we treated most data on the Internet/UUCP networks as queues. Data would come in via e-mail or Usenet or something, and you would go through it in chronological order until you were "caught up". Replies went below quoted blocks of text, and newer data sorted to the bottom of an index screen.
But when "blogs" started to become popular, they did an astonishing thing: they put newer data at the top of the feed, forcing you to read in reverse-chronological order. This was hard to get used to, if your blog was a serial novel or a multi-part series, but authors were aware of this and would say "this is part three of a multi-part series. If you haven't read part one yet, the link is here..."
And that's because data had suddenly switched from being a queue of data you had to complete your consumption of, to a stack of information you could pop down for as long as you had time or attention for. It didn't matter if you missed something, because there was so much bursting out of the firehose that you only ever sampled occasional moments in time to find out new things you were interested in.
Modern systems tend to mix these, showing top-level items in LIFO/stack order (like FPPs), and targeted replies to these items in FIFO/queue order (like this very comment you are reading now). Some of this mixing confuses people (consider the traditions on Twitter of calling out when a tweet is part of a longer queue-structured thread), but it seems to be the way we interact with data now.
I have old 1990s-style e-mail sorting that filters data into multiple inboxes. Some is from automatic sources, or comes from large groups of people or otherwise is high-volume content that I don't need to follow completely. That stuff is "stack" mail I can poke through occasionally and periodically flush with a clear conscience. But some inboxes are things I have Responsibility for, and they are "queue" mail I need to grind through methodically and make sure I never drop a stitch.
I am glad that I work somewhere that has moved most conversations to discourse or mattermost conversations, where these distinctions are rather explicit. It makes it easier to say "I won't read anything I'm not explicitly tagged into" and focus on something else as necessary.
But really, we should accept that e-mail should be relegated to "stack" data. Young people I know already only treat e-mail as "that place I seem to need to go for password resets sometimes."
posted by rum-soaked space hobo at 3:00 PM on December 16, 2020 [3 favorites]
mhoye, I was in a group that got much better at resilience after someone central was literally hit by a truck.
She recovered mostly and came back, and we got much better at documenting and role-twinning, but we never got up to sudden random vacations!
posted by clew at 3:02 PM on December 16, 2020 [1 favorite]
She recovered mostly and came back, and we got much better at documenting and role-twinning, but we never got up to sudden random vacations!
posted by clew at 3:02 PM on December 16, 2020 [1 favorite]
Really hope someone can tell Cory Doctorow he misspelled danah boyd’s name in the first line before he turns off his email.
posted by Going To Maine at 3:06 PM on December 16, 2020 [2 favorites]
posted by Going To Maine at 3:06 PM on December 16, 2020 [2 favorites]
like mandatory vacation policies for finance and IT folksYeah, bassooner, I have a close relative who works for a bank. A condition of employment is that she must take two weeks 'out' leave, every year, and they must be consecutive, and they are encouraged not to cover common holidays, where she is not allowed to check email or contact anyone at work in any way. Someone else must do her job. It's not humane, it's not about work-life balance at all, it's to stop the workers doing finance crimes. They're also forbidden from using non-approved social media at all, even to organise team drinks or office sport or the like, because that's how insider trading and cartel practices happen. 'Can we organise a WFH team meeting on zoom/jitsi/whatsapp/whatever'? 'no, finance regulation'
posted by Fiasco da Gama at 3:08 PM on December 16, 2020 [10 favorites]
I guess I'm failing to understand why people like boyd/Doctorow can't just go through their emails once they get back from vacation like everyone else? Thankfully I am lucky to have a job where I am not expected to check emails when I am out of the office, but once I get back I definitely am going to look through everything that came in while I was gone and address anything that's still needing attention. It definitely smacks of privilege to be able to say "I'm out of the office and I won't be reading your email when I get back in, try again later!" Nice work if you can get it!
posted by zeusianfog at 3:28 PM on December 16, 2020 [4 favorites]
posted by zeusianfog at 3:28 PM on December 16, 2020 [4 favorites]
Have you tried just ghosting everyone? It has the secondary advantage that you receive fewer emails in future, possibly including emails from your boss.
Many people in my company have deployed this trick. When you mention that you're "super behind on email" every single time there's a meeting, for a few months, people determine they cannot hope to reach you by email. But if you're lucky, they just decide they don't need to reach you at all. The downside of this is that because nobody ever sends or answers email, you spend all day every day in meetings that should have been an email.
posted by We put our faith in Blast Hardcheese at 3:30 PM on December 16, 2020 [7 favorites]
Many people in my company have deployed this trick. When you mention that you're "super behind on email" every single time there's a meeting, for a few months, people determine they cannot hope to reach you by email. But if you're lucky, they just decide they don't need to reach you at all. The downside of this is that because nobody ever sends or answers email, you spend all day every day in meetings that should have been an email.
posted by We put our faith in Blast Hardcheese at 3:30 PM on December 16, 2020 [7 favorites]
Please make sure you cc everyone, that way I can "reply all" and we can play out-of-office pong for the rest of the day!
Heh. The coworker of the ten-minute-max replies I mentioned up above? When she first arrived, for the first two months, every e-mail she sent was flagged as IMPORTANT, and ACKNOWLEDGMENT OF RECEIPT REQUIRED. When everyone else asked her to cool it, she explained that every e-mail she sent was important and people should send her acknowledgements so she could keep track of who had read what.
...I've gotta say, the European approach is superior.
I find that this is true about almost everything.
Incidentally, she was born and raised in Europe.
posted by ricochet biscuit at 3:51 PM on December 16, 2020 [1 favorite]
Heh. The coworker of the ten-minute-max replies I mentioned up above? When she first arrived, for the first two months, every e-mail she sent was flagged as IMPORTANT, and ACKNOWLEDGMENT OF RECEIPT REQUIRED. When everyone else asked her to cool it, she explained that every e-mail she sent was important and people should send her acknowledgements so she could keep track of who had read what.
...I've gotta say, the European approach is superior.
I find that this is true about almost everything.
Incidentally, she was born and raised in Europe.
posted by ricochet biscuit at 3:51 PM on December 16, 2020 [1 favorite]
Here is the conversation I have with my boss prior to vacation:
Me: ok I set up auto responses. You have my cell if there's an emergency, you can call.
Boss: I absolutely will not call you. I might IM you if the building burns down. Enjoy your vacation.
She's a good boss.
posted by emjaybee at 4:31 PM on December 16, 2020 [10 favorites]
Me: ok I set up auto responses. You have my cell if there's an emergency, you can call.
Boss: I absolutely will not call you. I might IM you if the building burns down. Enjoy your vacation.
She's a good boss.
posted by emjaybee at 4:31 PM on December 16, 2020 [10 favorites]
Personally, I'm glad that it seems increasingly unlikely that I'll ever be so "important" that my taking time off, and away from email, is a process that has to be begun six months before I take leave, and is much more complicated than a) simply asking people that I work with if there's anything that they need from me before I go and b) setting the autoreply on my email.
posted by Halloween Jack at 5:09 PM on December 16, 2020 [1 favorite]
posted by Halloween Jack at 5:09 PM on December 16, 2020 [1 favorite]
I don't know what the health condition he has is. I live with chronic pain, which is made worse by stress. If I were to take a vacation I would feel vastly better knowing that there is no e-mail piling up, waiting to attack me as soon as I got back to work. Good for him for showing how he deals with it.
I do think giving people six month's warning is odd: I don't know what I'd do with that information if a friend told me they'd be out of touch six months from now. But if it were someone I were working on a project with I'd appreciate the long warning so I could make sure we didn't have anything due during that time.
posted by The corpse in the library at 5:31 PM on December 16, 2020 [2 favorites]
I do think giving people six month's warning is odd: I don't know what I'd do with that information if a friend told me they'd be out of touch six months from now. But if it were someone I were working on a project with I'd appreciate the long warning so I could make sure we didn't have anything due during that time.
posted by The corpse in the library at 5:31 PM on December 16, 2020 [2 favorites]
"It just seems... a little self-important. Just turn on your vacation responder with a message that says "I'm on vacation until X date. For work inquiries email Y@whereever. If you need a personal response from me, email again after X date, as this email will not be seen." If you are bizarrely committed to a blank email inbox, then set up a filter to auto-delete. People go on vacation all the time, without having to lecture people about it six months ahead or make blog posts about a simple two step process."
I think this is saying more about you than it is about the article.
Maybe. But it does seem a little weird to say "hey, this thing we all do, where we don't read emails on vacation and then read them all after we get back? Yah I'm not doing that any more. I'm just deleting your shit."
Because if I sent you an email about a task I needed done during your vacation and I got back an auto-reply that you're out for two weeks and I needed that task taken care of before then, I'd just find someone else to figure it out. But if it was something that I DIDN'T need dealt with before you were back, and it's your job, then by deleting my email, you're making me work my schedule around yours: I've sent you something to do when you get back and you've just deleted it. So now you're saying I have to wait until you get back before I can start sending you emails?
If we're all going to do stupid extra work shit, then I'm going to just save all of the emails I would have sent you during your time off and then set them to auto-send at 9am the day you return. You're actually causing me extra work, so that you can avoid doing something that everybody does.
posted by nushustu at 5:49 PM on December 16, 2020 [14 favorites]
I think this is saying more about you than it is about the article.
Maybe. But it does seem a little weird to say "hey, this thing we all do, where we don't read emails on vacation and then read them all after we get back? Yah I'm not doing that any more. I'm just deleting your shit."
Because if I sent you an email about a task I needed done during your vacation and I got back an auto-reply that you're out for two weeks and I needed that task taken care of before then, I'd just find someone else to figure it out. But if it was something that I DIDN'T need dealt with before you were back, and it's your job, then by deleting my email, you're making me work my schedule around yours: I've sent you something to do when you get back and you've just deleted it. So now you're saying I have to wait until you get back before I can start sending you emails?
If we're all going to do stupid extra work shit, then I'm going to just save all of the emails I would have sent you during your time off and then set them to auto-send at 9am the day you return. You're actually causing me extra work, so that you can avoid doing something that everybody does.
posted by nushustu at 5:49 PM on December 16, 2020 [14 favorites]
Sorry to hear about Doctorow's illness. Chronic pain is horrible and effective, sustainable strategies to improve one's quality of life are thin on the ground; I sincerely hope that this will help him.
I feel like there are a bunch of conflicting issues getting smashed together in this thread. There are a lot of different jobs, distinct ways of working, and very different work cultures that involve email (to a larger or smaller degree) but that have different expectations about how/when to respond to them. And yes, there is the issue of your role in the organization, too.
For instance, I think that there is a difference between operational emails and opportunity emails. If you're in an operational role in an org, then the emails you get might have to do with keeping a project moving or reporting on progress up the management chain, or handling workflow questions from your staff. Alternately, you might be managing a help desk queue and the emails you get are from folks inside or outside the org who need help or need to be directed somewhere else. That's different than if you're in a role where each email you get might have regulatory importance or might legitimately lead to new business/funding opportunities. If you're in a role where most of your work is conducted via Slack maybe the only emails you get are either spam, unsolicited business offers, or notices for industry conferences, then you'll have a very different email experience than other folks.
Those are just some examples that don't even touch the issue of work cultures across industries and countries or personal struggles for work/life balance. How you would handle being away from email in each of those cases would be different.
All of which is to say that I get the irritation around the thought of having to create a strategic plan for managing email absences beyond "Out of the office, will return email when I get back" and what it might say about you if you occupy a role in the capitalist machine where you need one. But my ire is directed towards the machine rather than the worker. I guess I wish there was a way for all of us to have a more humane work experience instead of having to constantly scramble for ways to accommodate a totally broken, exploitative system at the expense of our health and family life.
posted by skye.dancer at 6:19 PM on December 16, 2020 [6 favorites]
I feel like there are a bunch of conflicting issues getting smashed together in this thread. There are a lot of different jobs, distinct ways of working, and very different work cultures that involve email (to a larger or smaller degree) but that have different expectations about how/when to respond to them. And yes, there is the issue of your role in the organization, too.
For instance, I think that there is a difference between operational emails and opportunity emails. If you're in an operational role in an org, then the emails you get might have to do with keeping a project moving or reporting on progress up the management chain, or handling workflow questions from your staff. Alternately, you might be managing a help desk queue and the emails you get are from folks inside or outside the org who need help or need to be directed somewhere else. That's different than if you're in a role where each email you get might have regulatory importance or might legitimately lead to new business/funding opportunities. If you're in a role where most of your work is conducted via Slack maybe the only emails you get are either spam, unsolicited business offers, or notices for industry conferences, then you'll have a very different email experience than other folks.
Those are just some examples that don't even touch the issue of work cultures across industries and countries or personal struggles for work/life balance. How you would handle being away from email in each of those cases would be different.
All of which is to say that I get the irritation around the thought of having to create a strategic plan for managing email absences beyond "Out of the office, will return email when I get back" and what it might say about you if you occupy a role in the capitalist machine where you need one. But my ire is directed towards the machine rather than the worker. I guess I wish there was a way for all of us to have a more humane work experience instead of having to constantly scramble for ways to accommodate a totally broken, exploitative system at the expense of our health and family life.
posted by skye.dancer at 6:19 PM on December 16, 2020 [6 favorites]
This is totally fine. This is THEIR email. They own it, and they can do, or not do, what they like with it.
posted by jeffehobbs at 6:22 PM on December 16, 2020 [3 favorites]
posted by jeffehobbs at 6:22 PM on December 16, 2020 [3 favorites]
I'm not a fan of CD, but it's funny that it seems like he's the Emmanuel Goldstein of Metafilter.
posted by ovvl at 7:14 PM on December 16, 2020 [1 favorite]
posted by ovvl at 7:14 PM on December 16, 2020 [1 favorite]
will drop this protip in here:
if you want to cut back on spam and stuff, just find the "load remote images" setting in your email client and switch it off. after a month or so, most auto-mailers' systems will just flag your account as "bounced" or "unengaged" and drop you off their list, or you can just pair this setting with the unsubscribe tool in OSX to remove yourself from a list without being considered "an engaged reader"
posted by raihan_ at 8:06 PM on December 16, 2020 [1 favorite]
if you want to cut back on spam and stuff, just find the "load remote images" setting in your email client and switch it off. after a month or so, most auto-mailers' systems will just flag your account as "bounced" or "unengaged" and drop you off their list, or you can just pair this setting with the unsubscribe tool in OSX to remove yourself from a list without being considered "an engaged reader"
posted by raihan_ at 8:06 PM on December 16, 2020 [1 favorite]
I'm not a fan of CD, but it's funny that it seems like he's the Emmanuel Goldstein of Metafilter.
I suspect that a big part of it is that Boing Boing sort of became a superstar blog of sorts when mostly what it did was exactly what MeFites do for free, albeit with pictures.
posted by Halloween Jack at 8:36 PM on December 16, 2020 [6 favorites]
I suspect that a big part of it is that Boing Boing sort of became a superstar blog of sorts when mostly what it did was exactly what MeFites do for free, albeit with pictures.
posted by Halloween Jack at 8:36 PM on December 16, 2020 [6 favorites]
I'm with Gotanda, when my job shifted to working from home a couple year ago, I set up similar boundaries with my work email. It took a little bit of training, but after a few initial hiccups, it was fine. My personal phone and email are in the directory at work for real emergencies.
I fact, I recently had to watch a bunch of cyber-security videos at work and one of the big take aways was: Do not engage with any email claiming to be urgent. And seriously, that's nearly aways good advice in any context.
Anyway, it sounds like sounds like Cory does not have a healthy relationship with his professional email (and other communication channels), and hopefully a multi-week fast and reset will help him get to a healthier place. It definitely sounds like a pretty extreme measure that most of us don't really need to consider.
posted by 3j0hn at 8:46 PM on December 16, 2020 [4 favorites]
I fact, I recently had to watch a bunch of cyber-security videos at work and one of the big take aways was: Do not engage with any email claiming to be urgent. And seriously, that's nearly aways good advice in any context.
Anyway, it sounds like sounds like Cory does not have a healthy relationship with his professional email (and other communication channels), and hopefully a multi-week fast and reset will help him get to a healthier place. It definitely sounds like a pretty extreme measure that most of us don't really need to consider.
posted by 3j0hn at 8:46 PM on December 16, 2020 [4 favorites]
This is your friendly teacher of organizational change, here to agree that some of these responses sound a little dysfunctional to me...
1. The Netflix chaos monkey and HR equivalent sound great. Indeed, if you can’t cover a role for emergency coverage, you’ve got some combination of understaffing and knowledge silos. Problem either way when people leave or have medical issues, given how long it takes to hire and train someone up into a new job. It happens, so it’s best to plan for it, not to mention that sudden turnover is higher when people are being stretched too thin.
2. If you feel compelled to answer email on evenings, weekends and vacations, are you being properly compensated for being on call? If not, that suggests an organizational culture and/or management problem. Might be time to start looking for a better job? At least that’s what I tell students. And that since I don’t get compensated like a corporate lawyer, they don’t get to expect responses from me on weekends.
3. Away messages and handovers are great! Normal and healthy organizational practices. As an academic, we even do these for research sabbatical (i.e. away from the office doing research, not a vacation, which gets its own away message.) OK, maybe I’m not like posting that on my blog - but maybe a LinkedIn post if I were doing a lecture at another university? The point being to set reasonable expectations.
4. Remember that back in the day, a manager would have an assistant to open and triage mail, screen phone calls and manage the (paper) calendar. (Why yes, that was my temp job one summer.) Email makes us more efficient in some ways, but it’s unfortunate that these types of admin jobs have been cut back so much, because that’s still an actual job. Of course you’re going to feel overworked trying to do that plus your core job responsibilities.
5. Unfortunately, this is partly a structural problem - the US healthcare and benefits boondoggle makes it more difficult to argue for adequate staffing. Not impossible, but paying two people plus benefits is more expensive than overworking a core staff. (I’m very appreciative of Australian labor rights and healthcare. No insurance worries if you want to leave a toxic job.)
That’s a problem, because
6. Vacations, sick leave and reasonable working hours have proven benefits for creativity, organizational resilience, lower turnover, lower stress, better hiring, etc. (Since people like references, let me drop a link to my favorite textbook - Anderson’s Organization Development.)
Overall, I do appreciate that we’re the lucky ones to have jobs during a pandemic, but decisions to tough it out under adverse conditions are a practical contingency, not an argument for dysfunctional workplace cultures.
Here’s hoping for more jobs and a better work-life balance in the new year for everyone!
posted by ec2y at 9:19 PM on December 16, 2020 [15 favorites]
1. The Netflix chaos monkey and HR equivalent sound great. Indeed, if you can’t cover a role for emergency coverage, you’ve got some combination of understaffing and knowledge silos. Problem either way when people leave or have medical issues, given how long it takes to hire and train someone up into a new job. It happens, so it’s best to plan for it, not to mention that sudden turnover is higher when people are being stretched too thin.
2. If you feel compelled to answer email on evenings, weekends and vacations, are you being properly compensated for being on call? If not, that suggests an organizational culture and/or management problem. Might be time to start looking for a better job? At least that’s what I tell students. And that since I don’t get compensated like a corporate lawyer, they don’t get to expect responses from me on weekends.
3. Away messages and handovers are great! Normal and healthy organizational practices. As an academic, we even do these for research sabbatical (i.e. away from the office doing research, not a vacation, which gets its own away message.) OK, maybe I’m not like posting that on my blog - but maybe a LinkedIn post if I were doing a lecture at another university? The point being to set reasonable expectations.
4. Remember that back in the day, a manager would have an assistant to open and triage mail, screen phone calls and manage the (paper) calendar. (Why yes, that was my temp job one summer.) Email makes us more efficient in some ways, but it’s unfortunate that these types of admin jobs have been cut back so much, because that’s still an actual job. Of course you’re going to feel overworked trying to do that plus your core job responsibilities.
5. Unfortunately, this is partly a structural problem - the US healthcare and benefits boondoggle makes it more difficult to argue for adequate staffing. Not impossible, but paying two people plus benefits is more expensive than overworking a core staff. (I’m very appreciative of Australian labor rights and healthcare. No insurance worries if you want to leave a toxic job.)
That’s a problem, because
6. Vacations, sick leave and reasonable working hours have proven benefits for creativity, organizational resilience, lower turnover, lower stress, better hiring, etc. (Since people like references, let me drop a link to my favorite textbook - Anderson’s Organization Development.)
Overall, I do appreciate that we’re the lucky ones to have jobs during a pandemic, but decisions to tough it out under adverse conditions are a practical contingency, not an argument for dysfunctional workplace cultures.
Here’s hoping for more jobs and a better work-life balance in the new year for everyone!
posted by ec2y at 9:19 PM on December 16, 2020 [15 favorites]
I think that if the hostility of some responses is baffling to people, consider that a huge number of Americans (I can only speak to an American job experience here) are told that they are lucky to have jobs at all and that the most basic ability to set some boundaries would result in the loss of that job.
Gee, when did Doctorow find the time to do all of that to everybody?
posted by MrJM at 9:31 PM on December 16, 2020 [2 favorites]
Gee, when did Doctorow find the time to do all of that to everybody?
posted by MrJM at 9:31 PM on December 16, 2020 [2 favorites]
This is where I tell the story about the job where we were expected to file correspondence—as increasingly large sets of .msg files—in 'incoming' and 'outgoing' folders for each project, work out which billable job the email referred to, find the job no., drag the message from Outlook to the Explorer window, every time we received or sent an email
posted by Fiasco da Gama at 9:52 PM on December 16, 2020 [3 favorites]
posted by Fiasco da Gama at 9:52 PM on December 16, 2020 [3 favorites]
Oh my god my job wants me to file all my emails by project too and I just stopped doing it 4 years ago because it was so ridiculously time consuming.
This year IT kindly partitioned my inbox because it was “unusually large” LOL
posted by annie o at 10:08 PM on December 16, 2020 [3 favorites]
This year IT kindly partitioned my inbox because it was “unusually large” LOL
posted by annie o at 10:08 PM on December 16, 2020 [3 favorites]
This is totally fine. This is THEIR email. They own it, and they can do, or not do, what they like with it.
It's not Gmail then.
posted by Cardinal Fang at 12:03 AM on December 17, 2020 [2 favorites]
It's not Gmail then.
posted by Cardinal Fang at 12:03 AM on December 17, 2020 [2 favorites]
Heh. The coworker of the ten-minute-max replies I mentioned up above? When she first arrived, for the first two months, every e-mail she sent was flagged as IMPORTANT, and ACKNOWLEDGMENT OF RECEIPT REQUIRED.
This is why the original email RFCs deliberately omitted priority flags and return receipts.
posted by Cardinal Fang at 12:15 AM on December 17, 2020
This is why the original email RFCs deliberately omitted priority flags and return receipts.
posted by Cardinal Fang at 12:15 AM on December 17, 2020
I don't really agree, but this is the funniest thing I've read in a month and I'm stealing it.
posted by mecran01 at 11:58 AM on December 16 [5 favorites +] [!]
Enjoy it in good health.
I couldn't think of another character with a more similar act off the top of my head.
posted by StarkRoads at 12:48 AM on December 17, 2020
posted by mecran01 at 11:58 AM on December 16 [5 favorites +] [!]
Enjoy it in good health.
I couldn't think of another character with a more similar act off the top of my head.
posted by StarkRoads at 12:48 AM on December 17, 2020
basically: there's some crabpotting going on.
Sorry but I work for and with a bunch of academics. If I got an auto-response from one of them telling me all their email is going to the trash for a set amount of time and I, their poor secretary with a million other things to do, need to make a note to email them it again later, I would think they were a massive dick.
It's not my fault they don't have the self control to not check their mail on vacation. Maybe I'm grouchy today, but fuck self-important twats like this.
posted by Brain Sturgeon at 4:52 AM on December 17, 2020 [12 favorites]
Sorry but I work for and with a bunch of academics. If I got an auto-response from one of them telling me all their email is going to the trash for a set amount of time and I, their poor secretary with a million other things to do, need to make a note to email them it again later, I would think they were a massive dick.
It's not my fault they don't have the self control to not check their mail on vacation. Maybe I'm grouchy today, but fuck self-important twats like this.
posted by Brain Sturgeon at 4:52 AM on December 17, 2020 [12 favorites]
It's not my fault they don't have the self control to not check their mail on vacation.
I know we like to generalise from specific examples but the author is not asking you, Brain Sturgeon, to schedule your email to him for when he returns. He's not actually telling anyone to do that. He's saying, I will not get any email between date X and date Y, do what you want with that information.
Someone dear to me published several novels in the pre-Internet era. No one in their family took their work seriously. The neighbors did not take their work seriously. People would just drop by, knock on the door, and basically invite themselves in. If my writer pal tried to explain they were busy with their writing, people would sometimes scoff in their face, literally, because they could write anytime, writing isn't real work! Pshaw, etc.
The folks who did take this writer seriously, such as fans (mostly) and librarians, were happy to write (which was great) and call (which was not so great). They called at all different times and days because they were fans. Surely the writer would make time for their fans! The writer did, but not always to good effect.
Anyway, that was pre-email and other such distractions. Obviously Doctorow does not work within a standard corporate framework that would make such a choice impossible but I have great sympathy for writers of any sort trying to flee from email during a vacation.
posted by Bella Donna at 5:32 AM on December 17, 2020 [7 favorites]
I know we like to generalise from specific examples but the author is not asking you, Brain Sturgeon, to schedule your email to him for when he returns. He's not actually telling anyone to do that. He's saying, I will not get any email between date X and date Y, do what you want with that information.
Someone dear to me published several novels in the pre-Internet era. No one in their family took their work seriously. The neighbors did not take their work seriously. People would just drop by, knock on the door, and basically invite themselves in. If my writer pal tried to explain they were busy with their writing, people would sometimes scoff in their face, literally, because they could write anytime, writing isn't real work! Pshaw, etc.
The folks who did take this writer seriously, such as fans (mostly) and librarians, were happy to write (which was great) and call (which was not so great). They called at all different times and days because they were fans. Surely the writer would make time for their fans! The writer did, but not always to good effect.
Anyway, that was pre-email and other such distractions. Obviously Doctorow does not work within a standard corporate framework that would make such a choice impossible but I have great sympathy for writers of any sort trying to flee from email during a vacation.
posted by Bella Donna at 5:32 AM on December 17, 2020 [7 favorites]
I know we like to generalise from specific examples but the author is not asking you, Brain Sturgeon, to schedule your email to him for when he returns. He's not actually telling anyone to do that. He's saying, I will not get any email between date X and date Y, do what you want with that information.
Which still effectively means I would have to remember to send him the email later or I might get fired. It's an inconsiderate thing to do is what I'm saying, as it's making my job just that much harder.
posted by Brain Sturgeon at 5:51 AM on December 17, 2020 [8 favorites]
Which still effectively means I would have to remember to send him the email later or I might get fired. It's an inconsiderate thing to do is what I'm saying, as it's making my job just that much harder.
posted by Brain Sturgeon at 5:51 AM on December 17, 2020 [8 favorites]
the author is not asking you, Brain Sturgeon, to schedule your email to him for when he returns.
From boyd's post:
"If you send me a message during this period, I will never receive it and never respond to it. If you need to contact me, please send your email after January 12."
posted by warriorqueen at 5:51 AM on December 17, 2020 [10 favorites]
From boyd's post:
"If you send me a message during this period, I will never receive it and never respond to it. If you need to contact me, please send your email after January 12."
posted by warriorqueen at 5:51 AM on December 17, 2020 [10 favorites]
I have a job where evening and weekend email access is expected, but I feel that I get compensated sufficiently for that. If I don't want that after-hours access anymore, I could either arrange a demotion or return to agency work (where people maintain much better work/life balances but get paid proportionately less, too).
People need to be able to take breaks and arranging for a vacation without email access seems like a good thing that people should be able to do. The thing that seems less fine to me is what was highlighted just above -- this approach puts all the burden on other people. That seems workable if you are, say, a writer or public figure where mostly people are contacting you in a supplicant kind of role -- adding one more minor speed bump to their communications is par for the course. But if you are a regular working person where emails contain information, requests, and so on from both internal coworkers and external clients or customers, dumping that back on the other person is not best practices and will mean you miss things that you actually need for your job.
The full cut-off and deletion approach described in this FPP would not work in my job context at all, but I can see how it would work well for other people in other contexts. It's a valid tool, just not one that most people can use. It's a little like being told how smart it is to own a vacation house during the pandemic -- yes, this is a great time to own a vacation house, but most of us can't do that; it's not that we aren't smart enough to think of it ourselves.
posted by Dip Flash at 6:34 AM on December 17, 2020 [11 favorites]
People need to be able to take breaks and arranging for a vacation without email access seems like a good thing that people should be able to do. The thing that seems less fine to me is what was highlighted just above -- this approach puts all the burden on other people. That seems workable if you are, say, a writer or public figure where mostly people are contacting you in a supplicant kind of role -- adding one more minor speed bump to their communications is par for the course. But if you are a regular working person where emails contain information, requests, and so on from both internal coworkers and external clients or customers, dumping that back on the other person is not best practices and will mean you miss things that you actually need for your job.
The full cut-off and deletion approach described in this FPP would not work in my job context at all, but I can see how it would work well for other people in other contexts. It's a valid tool, just not one that most people can use. It's a little like being told how smart it is to own a vacation house during the pandemic -- yes, this is a great time to own a vacation house, but most of us can't do that; it's not that we aren't smart enough to think of it ourselves.
posted by Dip Flash at 6:34 AM on December 17, 2020 [11 favorites]
I could swear that we had this same conversation but about Tim Ferriss; he would reply to e-mails only in one short window (daily? weekly?) to save him time, and had an autoresponse saying something like "I reply to e-mails during these hours," thus doubling the amount of Ferriss-related e-mail other people had to deal with.
posted by The corpse in the library at 6:49 AM on December 17, 2020 [5 favorites]
posted by The corpse in the library at 6:49 AM on December 17, 2020 [5 favorites]
I generally go by the rule that if it needs a non-immediate response, you send an email. If you need a response immediately, you use chat. But it's a two-way street: if you have to spend paragraphs setting up a question, you shouldn't do that in chat.
Also, generally I try to respond to emails within 24 hours. Sometimes my response might be "I don't have your answer now, but I will get to work on it." As long as I've replied to your email within a day, I feel like I've met the polite expectation. And generally I hope for the same in responses from my email requests.
If you go on vacation? Then I'm hopeful that you can reply to my emails within a week after your return, although I generally am pretty flexible with that if I don't dislike you. And I try to do the same. But this idea that you'd just throw my emails away when you're out? What even is that. The only time that's acceptable is when you quit/get fired/laid off. Then feel free to not ever respond. But that's about it.
posted by nushustu at 8:44 AM on December 17, 2020 [5 favorites]
Also, generally I try to respond to emails within 24 hours. Sometimes my response might be "I don't have your answer now, but I will get to work on it." As long as I've replied to your email within a day, I feel like I've met the polite expectation. And generally I hope for the same in responses from my email requests.
If you go on vacation? Then I'm hopeful that you can reply to my emails within a week after your return, although I generally am pretty flexible with that if I don't dislike you. And I try to do the same. But this idea that you'd just throw my emails away when you're out? What even is that. The only time that's acceptable is when you quit/get fired/laid off. Then feel free to not ever respond. But that's about it.
posted by nushustu at 8:44 AM on December 17, 2020 [5 favorites]
Also, I'm trying to imagine how this would go if you turned this into a microaggression kind of thing: any emails you send me on the weekends? Deleted without reading. Emails after work hours? Deleted without reading. Lunch break? Deleted without reading. See how far you get with that attitude.
posted by nushustu at 8:45 AM on December 17, 2020 [4 favorites]
posted by nushustu at 8:45 AM on December 17, 2020 [4 favorites]
allegedly the band kraftwerk could only compose and record songs if they had absolute and total control over the sounds in their environment. because a telephone ringing would be impossibly disruptive, they removed the bell from the phone in their studio.
after their agent observed that sometimes it would be useful to be able to contact them, they refused to reinstall the bell but instead made a practice of picking up the phone at a precise time every day. if anyone with the number needed to contact them, they would call at that exact second, and their call would just so happen to come through at the moment the appointed band member picked up the phone.
posted by Reclusive Novelist Thomas Pynchon at 8:46 AM on December 17, 2020 [9 favorites]
after their agent observed that sometimes it would be useful to be able to contact them, they refused to reinstall the bell but instead made a practice of picking up the phone at a precise time every day. if anyone with the number needed to contact them, they would call at that exact second, and their call would just so happen to come through at the moment the appointed band member picked up the phone.
posted by Reclusive Novelist Thomas Pynchon at 8:46 AM on December 17, 2020 [9 favorites]
I went to Japan for three weeks back in 2007, and there was a minor problem with my PTO paperwork.* Someone in the HR department sent me a series of increasingly strident emails about this problem over the course of about ten days, assuming that I was checking my email and just not responding to it, despite the paperwork in question clearly showing that I was on vacation. They finally CCed my supervisor, who stopped the whole mess by saying that I was probably not checking my email because I was in Japan. YA THINK?
*Which turned out to be not my fault anyway.
posted by telophase at 9:03 AM on December 17, 2020 [3 favorites]
*Which turned out to be not my fault anyway.
posted by telophase at 9:03 AM on December 17, 2020 [3 favorites]
annie_o: Oh my god my job wants me to file all my emails by project too and I just stopped doing it 4 years ago because it was so ridiculously time consuming.
Every time my computer is replaced (started every 3 years, then every 4, and I was saved from every 5 years this summer by my computer dying), I somehow manage to screw up the transfer of my older email archives such that email older than 3 or so years is lost. It's not intentional, but it's freeing enough that I haven't gone out of my way to figure out how not to screw up the transfer.
posted by telophase at 9:09 AM on December 17, 2020 [2 favorites]
Every time my computer is replaced (started every 3 years, then every 4, and I was saved from every 5 years this summer by my computer dying), I somehow manage to screw up the transfer of my older email archives such that email older than 3 or so years is lost. It's not intentional, but it's freeing enough that I haven't gone out of my way to figure out how not to screw up the transfer.
posted by telophase at 9:09 AM on December 17, 2020 [2 favorites]
I currently work for the government and we are not encouraged to read email when we are on vacation, which is nice. When I return from vacation, I only cursorily read anything that came in in the meantime. All of it is from coworkers as I have no contact with the general public in my position. Most of it is just ongoing status updates and things that have been resolved. I'll read those in depth if I think I need to know the answer, but otherwise, I just delete them. I try to catch things that might specifically require an answer from me, but I move pretty fast through everything and I occasionally miss things -- my coworkers all know that I was away, and if they still need whatever it is, they know I'm back.
If I still have unread email from while I was away left in my inbasket by noon on the day I return, that would be unusual. Agonizing over the reams of email I get in my absence would only rarely catch something I miss and it's just not worth it.
I had a colleague at IBM who had a paper filing system I always admired. He just chucked things in a drawer in a big pile. If he needed something, he went rifling through the drawer for it without really disturbing the layers and when he was done with it, he chucked it back in. Through this method, the things he needed remained floated to the top and useless things fell to the bottom. When the drawer got full, he would pick up the top half and move it into a different drawer, then throw the bottom half into the recycling bin without looking at it. Now the different drawer was the new pile. I was nowhere near confident enough that early in my career to take that kind of approach to things, and now I have legal records retention obligations that would prevent it, but I always found the mindset sort of inspiring. It was very "retaining these things is meant to serve me, and I will not spend time serving them". I think there's a way to translate that mindset to email, and "I'm away and your email is being deleted" is possibly one of them -- though email is a communication between two (or 200) people and you do need to be mindful of the way that your approach imposes on other people, as well.
posted by jacquilynne at 9:10 AM on December 17, 2020 [10 favorites]
If I still have unread email from while I was away left in my inbasket by noon on the day I return, that would be unusual. Agonizing over the reams of email I get in my absence would only rarely catch something I miss and it's just not worth it.
I had a colleague at IBM who had a paper filing system I always admired. He just chucked things in a drawer in a big pile. If he needed something, he went rifling through the drawer for it without really disturbing the layers and when he was done with it, he chucked it back in. Through this method, the things he needed remained floated to the top and useless things fell to the bottom. When the drawer got full, he would pick up the top half and move it into a different drawer, then throw the bottom half into the recycling bin without looking at it. Now the different drawer was the new pile. I was nowhere near confident enough that early in my career to take that kind of approach to things, and now I have legal records retention obligations that would prevent it, but I always found the mindset sort of inspiring. It was very "retaining these things is meant to serve me, and I will not spend time serving them". I think there's a way to translate that mindset to email, and "I'm away and your email is being deleted" is possibly one of them -- though email is a communication between two (or 200) people and you do need to be mindful of the way that your approach imposes on other people, as well.
posted by jacquilynne at 9:10 AM on December 17, 2020 [10 favorites]
The point that this is all a consequence of convenience erasing the actually important role of a human administrator/secretary needs to be re-emphasised, imo. Actually important people with the commensurate pay STILL have secretaries to handle their email/correspondence - even if this seems to be variable across sectors I admit. It's not worth it, to my mind, to be mad about ppl who has genuine problems themselves dealing with this avalanche and coming up with a variety of individual solutions for a systemic problem, and i also would like to agree this seems to be a very specific american work culture by-product. For example, 2020 hasn't been easy for me either, but every single online writing I've encountered about the anxiety and stress of always-on video calls seem to come from american workers, when where I'm from most zoom calls are treated as what they are: audio-only conference calls. USA work culture and expectations of always on communications is a genuine issue and i don't know if it's really that productive to be mad about ppl barely above your socioeconomic class trying to also handle that same social pressure.
posted by cendawanita at 9:12 AM on December 17, 2020 [10 favorites]
posted by cendawanita at 9:12 AM on December 17, 2020 [10 favorites]
To carry that thought forward, it seems Cory's email sabbatical runs from Thursday 17th December to Sunday 3rd January inclusive. That is pretty much the same length of holiday – a touch over two weeks – that a lot of European office workers I know are taking this year, including myself. Obviously I can't speak for what their email autoresponders will be doing, but it's a very normal length of time to not be answering emails.
Cory lived in the UK for many years so he would know this, though he was still working as an author and, essentially, freelance consultant back then; perhaps he never took that long off himself.
posted by adrianhon at 9:23 AM on December 17, 2020 [1 favorite]
Cory lived in the UK for many years so he would know this, though he was still working as an author and, essentially, freelance consultant back then; perhaps he never took that long off himself.
posted by adrianhon at 9:23 AM on December 17, 2020 [1 favorite]
The unexamined privilege of someone without a boss.
I understand the need to be able to constantly handle things at a project or organisation level, but it seems bizarre to me to just count on individuals handling that for themselves. In fact, it is the people who do not have a boss but are purely self-employed or running a very small business who are least able to do this. The whole point of a boss is to manage work allocation.
I have a boss but ultimately they only want to know that the right systems are in place to handle the work and that clients are happy, why would they want to be able to email me when I'm on holiday? That's why they have more than one person working for them, so they can assign work to the appropriate people who are available.
I work in an industry where our clients require us to be reachable and responsive all the time on deals which we're supporting. So there's no way a whole project team could be unreachable but that isn't the same as individuals being unreachable.
We have project email addresses for every project, clients are expected to CC the project email address in their emails to us.
We also agree for each project at each time who is responsible for reading and responding to those emails and assigning additional work as a result.
posted by atrazine at 9:28 AM on December 17, 2020 [1 favorite]
I understand the need to be able to constantly handle things at a project or organisation level, but it seems bizarre to me to just count on individuals handling that for themselves. In fact, it is the people who do not have a boss but are purely self-employed or running a very small business who are least able to do this. The whole point of a boss is to manage work allocation.
I have a boss but ultimately they only want to know that the right systems are in place to handle the work and that clients are happy, why would they want to be able to email me when I'm on holiday? That's why they have more than one person working for them, so they can assign work to the appropriate people who are available.
I work in an industry where our clients require us to be reachable and responsive all the time on deals which we're supporting. So there's no way a whole project team could be unreachable but that isn't the same as individuals being unreachable.
We have project email addresses for every project, clients are expected to CC the project email address in their emails to us.
We also agree for each project at each time who is responsible for reading and responding to those emails and assigning additional work as a result.
posted by atrazine at 9:28 AM on December 17, 2020 [1 favorite]
i don't know if it's really that productive to be mad about ppl barely above your socioeconomic class trying to also handle that same social pressure.
But there are literally dozens of other ways to handle the problem of not wanting to be bothered by work emails while you're on vacation that don't create extra headache for others. That's what I'm not getting here. You can just not check your email, delete the app, disable notifications, not bring your phone, all of the above etc., etc. It's not that hard so why the weird flex (on Doctorow/Boyd's part)?
posted by Jess the Mess at 9:37 AM on December 17, 2020 [4 favorites]
But there are literally dozens of other ways to handle the problem of not wanting to be bothered by work emails while you're on vacation that don't create extra headache for others. That's what I'm not getting here. You can just not check your email, delete the app, disable notifications, not bring your phone, all of the above etc., etc. It's not that hard so why the weird flex (on Doctorow/Boyd's part)?
posted by Jess the Mess at 9:37 AM on December 17, 2020 [4 favorites]
Because the point is that even if you don't check your email while you are away, dealing with all the stuff that came in while you were away when you get back is also part of the problem. This way, people who email them when they get back should only send them things that are still relevant now that they are back.
This thread is making me rethink my relationship with the out of office notice. Outlook tells me in advance which of the people I've addressed an email to have an active OOO. I think I'm going to start really looking at those and thinking about whether the person needs to be copied on this email or whether it will be moot by the time they return. Since everyone on my team is going to be out at some point in the next three weeks, it's the perfect time to start.
posted by jacquilynne at 9:42 AM on December 17, 2020 [10 favorites]
This thread is making me rethink my relationship with the out of office notice. Outlook tells me in advance which of the people I've addressed an email to have an active OOO. I think I'm going to start really looking at those and thinking about whether the person needs to be copied on this email or whether it will be moot by the time they return. Since everyone on my team is going to be out at some point in the next three weeks, it's the perfect time to start.
posted by jacquilynne at 9:42 AM on December 17, 2020 [10 favorites]
i don't know if it's really that productive to be mad about ppl barely above your socioeconomic class trying to also handle that same social pressure.
Okay, that reasoning makes sense but it's still shifting your burden on to others (mostly those positioned below you) which is not very cool.
posted by Jess the Mess at 9:51 AM on December 17, 2020 [2 favorites]
Okay, that reasoning makes sense but it's still shifting your burden on to others (mostly those positioned below you) which is not very cool.
posted by Jess the Mess at 9:51 AM on December 17, 2020 [2 favorites]
Yet another time where I feel like I'm reading dispatches from another universe, time and place.
Mandatory paid vacations are the norm in Communist (social-democratic) countries like Australia and Germany. I wouldn't dream of checking work emails during any of my paid 30-days-a-year vacations. The exception is the night before I go back to work after a particularly long break, just to make sure there were no major clusterfucks that happened while I was gone that I don't want to wander into without warning on my first day back.
posted by WhyamIhereagain at 9:51 AM on December 17, 2020 [6 favorites]
Mandatory paid vacations are the norm in Communist (social-democratic) countries like Australia and Germany. I wouldn't dream of checking work emails during any of my paid 30-days-a-year vacations. The exception is the night before I go back to work after a particularly long break, just to make sure there were no major clusterfucks that happened while I was gone that I don't want to wander into without warning on my first day back.
posted by WhyamIhereagain at 9:51 AM on December 17, 2020 [6 favorites]
Most email is garbage. It's people trying to cross an item off their to-do list, and emailing me to get it on my to-do list is the quickest way to do that. When I get back from a long vacation 99% of the emails I receive are obsolete. The person who sent them just forgot I was away, or didn't know. But I have to track down each one and ask "Hey do you still need XYZ?" That is THEM burdening ME with pointless work.
So I don't see how it's a problem to say "Boss or Coworker can help you or let's get in touch when I return." Then get a 5 minute debrief when I get back. In fact that is pretty much exactly what I, a white collar drone with a boss, put in my email/voicemail out of office messages. And if I was pro-active about it I wouldn't have a voice mail box full of people saying "Hey sorry I didn't know you were on vacation, I'll talk to you next week."
But Americans have such a weird puritanical culture where it is seen as a flex to take time off.
posted by muddgirl at 10:05 AM on December 17, 2020 [3 favorites]
So I don't see how it's a problem to say "Boss or Coworker can help you or let's get in touch when I return." Then get a 5 minute debrief when I get back. In fact that is pretty much exactly what I, a white collar drone with a boss, put in my email/voicemail out of office messages. And if I was pro-active about it I wouldn't have a voice mail box full of people saying "Hey sorry I didn't know you were on vacation, I'll talk to you next week."
But Americans have such a weird puritanical culture where it is seen as a flex to take time off.
posted by muddgirl at 10:05 AM on December 17, 2020 [3 favorites]
Ooft. My brain is practically melting out of my ears at the discovery there are people who read their work emails on vacation. It's vacation!
I had no idea. If I don't get to completely forget that I even have a job during my vacation, it's not a vacation.
posted by penguin pie at 10:11 AM on December 17, 2020 [10 favorites]
I had no idea. If I don't get to completely forget that I even have a job during my vacation, it's not a vacation.
posted by penguin pie at 10:11 AM on December 17, 2020 [10 favorites]
This seems a bit precious to me (though I admire boyd and Doctorow), but I still appreciate learning about how all kinds of people--from the ultra-privileged and Very Online to the badgered public school administrative assistants--handle 24/7 connectedness and the attention-splintering nonstop information assault of our age. Every article like this is a reminder that others struggle with it, too, that there are a million ways to handle it and a million different workplace cultures, that we can make some conscious choices about it.
This reflects my feelings. I love email and I spend a lot of time managing it. I have no boss. Very Online people are a specific kind of people. Cory creates friction here for whatever reason. I like him, and danah. I don't think I've ever had an email holiday, but I will go days without answering the phone or checking social media.
I have a similar anecdote about the work I do (did?) where I'd do public speaking at library conferences. I have a pretty strict list of requirements, mostly small-time bullshit, but one of which is that I can't speak before 11 am or my fee doubles (negotiable). Most places work with me on that, some can't for various reasons and that is fine. However every now and again places will harangue me about it and this is always confusing to me; it's just a boundary. I have to be honest, I would find "I am deleting all email I am getting between X and Y date" to be essentially offloading one person's disliked tasks and potentially, maybe unintentionally, creating problems for others. It's not a value neutral on/off type of choice like "hire me or don't" if you live in a world where you have existing relationships. I think this is really part of the issue with email, it's an interaction, even if you want it to just be a set of notifications and tasks. And so an inbox can be full of feelings even if you didn't put any in there. Thanks for this post and the discussion, it's an interesting thing to mull over.
posted by jessamyn at 10:50 AM on December 17, 2020 [11 favorites]
This reflects my feelings. I love email and I spend a lot of time managing it. I have no boss. Very Online people are a specific kind of people. Cory creates friction here for whatever reason. I like him, and danah. I don't think I've ever had an email holiday, but I will go days without answering the phone or checking social media.
I have a similar anecdote about the work I do (did?) where I'd do public speaking at library conferences. I have a pretty strict list of requirements, mostly small-time bullshit, but one of which is that I can't speak before 11 am or my fee doubles (negotiable). Most places work with me on that, some can't for various reasons and that is fine. However every now and again places will harangue me about it and this is always confusing to me; it's just a boundary. I have to be honest, I would find "I am deleting all email I am getting between X and Y date" to be essentially offloading one person's disliked tasks and potentially, maybe unintentionally, creating problems for others. It's not a value neutral on/off type of choice like "hire me or don't" if you live in a world where you have existing relationships. I think this is really part of the issue with email, it's an interaction, even if you want it to just be a set of notifications and tasks. And so an inbox can be full of feelings even if you didn't put any in there. Thanks for this post and the discussion, it's an interesting thing to mull over.
posted by jessamyn at 10:50 AM on December 17, 2020 [11 favorites]
I wouldn't dream of checking work emails during any of my paid 30-days-a-year vacations.
I mean, I work with people in Germany and many other Euro, Asia, and even a few in South America. The number of people who disappeared for 30 consecutive days without any contact in the past few years I could probably count on one hand.
posted by The_Vegetables at 11:01 AM on December 17, 2020 [1 favorite]
I mean, I work with people in Germany and many other Euro, Asia, and even a few in South America. The number of people who disappeared for 30 consecutive days without any contact in the past few years I could probably count on one hand.
posted by The_Vegetables at 11:01 AM on December 17, 2020 [1 favorite]
> I still appreciate learning about how all kinds of people--from the ultra-privileged and Very Online to the badgered public school administrative assistants--handle 24/7 connectedness and the attention-splintering nonstop information assault of our age
I find it interesting, too, even though I haven't worked in an office since 2002. It's like reading about other people's diets, or... well, pretty much all of AskMe. You do what like how? Huh!
posted by The corpse in the library at 11:19 AM on December 17, 2020
I find it interesting, too, even though I haven't worked in an office since 2002. It's like reading about other people's diets, or... well, pretty much all of AskMe. You do what like how? Huh!
posted by The corpse in the library at 11:19 AM on December 17, 2020
30 days a year is not 30 days in a row. My US company just moved us from 33 days per year for those over 20 years of service down to 28 days a year but added 3 paid holidays.
posted by soelo at 11:25 AM on December 17, 2020 [2 favorites]
posted by soelo at 11:25 AM on December 17, 2020 [2 favorites]
I had no idea. If I don't get to completely forget that I even have a job during my vacation, it's not a vacation.
Lately I find that I forget I have a job almost immediately upon logging out from Bad Computer and logging in to Good Computer. The other morning when my alarm went off after a long weekend I was legitimately confused about what it wanted from me.
posted by We put our faith in Blast Hardcheese at 12:31 PM on December 17, 2020 [9 favorites]
Lately I find that I forget I have a job almost immediately upon logging out from Bad Computer and logging in to Good Computer. The other morning when my alarm went off after a long weekend I was legitimately confused about what it wanted from me.
posted by We put our faith in Blast Hardcheese at 12:31 PM on December 17, 2020 [9 favorites]
My brain is practically melting out of my ears at the discovery there are people who read their work emails on vacation. It's vacation!
Having been someone with a lot of important work e-mails, I've personally found that spending 5-10 minutes a day on vacation (if they're available) making sure that a few top priority things get followed up by someone else or responded to makes the wave of e-mail to dig through when I get back so much better. I won't disrupt vacation activities for it, but if I've got a few minutes here and there waiting on coffee or settling down for bed, a little maintenance goes a long way.
But conversely, I get a lot of freedom and leeway in day to day work. If I want to take extra time for a long lunch or a few hours to take care of a chore, I can just do so without having to account for it. If I were being nickle and dimed day to day, I wouldn't deal with e-mail on vacation.
posted by Candleman at 12:40 PM on December 17, 2020 [4 favorites]
Having been someone with a lot of important work e-mails, I've personally found that spending 5-10 minutes a day on vacation (if they're available) making sure that a few top priority things get followed up by someone else or responded to makes the wave of e-mail to dig through when I get back so much better. I won't disrupt vacation activities for it, but if I've got a few minutes here and there waiting on coffee or settling down for bed, a little maintenance goes a long way.
But conversely, I get a lot of freedom and leeway in day to day work. If I want to take extra time for a long lunch or a few hours to take care of a chore, I can just do so without having to account for it. If I were being nickle and dimed day to day, I wouldn't deal with e-mail on vacation.
posted by Candleman at 12:40 PM on December 17, 2020 [4 favorites]
If you want to not respond to email, just go ahead and not respond and have an autoreply on. Having a big I HEREBY DECLARE EMAIL IS OFF message and a blog post feels like a request for validation and attention when neither is necessary.
Obviously, this advice is no more pitched toward someone who can just do that and not get in trouble than it is pitched at people who don't use email for work at all.
posted by straight at 3:06 PM on December 17, 2020 [1 favorite]
Obviously, this advice is no more pitched toward someone who can just do that and not get in trouble than it is pitched at people who don't use email for work at all.
posted by straight at 3:06 PM on December 17, 2020 [1 favorite]
If you want to not respond to email, just go ahead and not respond and have an autoreply on. Having a big I HEREBY DECLARE EMAIL IS OFF message and a blog post feels like a request for validation and attention when neither is necessary.
There's also a bit of parleying a realistic bit of office drama as branded lifestyle content.
Some of the email filtering strategies communicated in this thread have been good to consider, they are appreciated.
posted by StarkRoads at 3:16 PM on December 17, 2020 [5 favorites]
There's also a bit of parleying a realistic bit of office drama as branded lifestyle content.
Some of the email filtering strategies communicated in this thread have been good to consider, they are appreciated.
posted by StarkRoads at 3:16 PM on December 17, 2020 [5 favorites]
Today's my last day in the office until 6th January. My division of 55 or so people have agreed cover plans for the holiday period, so there'll always be one member of senior management team on call, and a scattering of others spread through the next few weeks.
Work has been distributed, reprioritised and scheduled in a way that we can do this and so that I can just put on my out of office and say:
Hi, I'm now out of the office until 6th January. If you need anything related to (topic) in my absence, please contact (person A) or (person B).
I'll then spend some time on the 6th going through what's in my inbox, most of which will have been dealt with already, and write up a list of the things I need to do.
Generally works pretty well. And I won't be checking my work email over that period at all.
posted by knapah at 1:39 AM on December 18, 2020 [2 favorites]
Work has been distributed, reprioritised and scheduled in a way that we can do this and so that I can just put on my out of office and say:
Hi, I'm now out of the office until 6th January. If you need anything related to (topic) in my absence, please contact (person A) or (person B).
I'll then spend some time on the 6th going through what's in my inbox, most of which will have been dealt with already, and write up a list of the things I need to do.
Generally works pretty well. And I won't be checking my work email over that period at all.
posted by knapah at 1:39 AM on December 18, 2020 [2 favorites]
I mean, I work with people in Germany and many other Euro, Asia, and even a few in South America. The number of people who disappeared for 30 consecutive days without any contact in the past few years I could probably count on one hand.
That's 30 days a year, not 30 consececutive days. I can't take more than 14 at a time at the company I work for in Germany.
posted by WhyamIhereagain at 5:57 AM on December 18, 2020
That's 30 days a year, not 30 consececutive days. I can't take more than 14 at a time at the company I work for in Germany.
posted by WhyamIhereagain at 5:57 AM on December 18, 2020
1. When you realize that thing you asked of them didn't happen or they didn't reply, send an email. Not asking for anything? Then why email? Info updates go in documentation or aren't that important.
Once again, this depends on the nature of your work. For example, at some points in my career I've had to send information on behalf of other people, like "get this information to this person please" or say, agendas for upcoming meetings, board documents, etc. Contracts. Changes of dates and venues. Requests for information that can wait some time but not forever.
This may shock you but also, not all people who get information from each other share the same file server or systems.
Yesterday I was more eh whatever but today the privilege here is weighing on me. Dealing with email is both labour and maybe, if your growing inbox is stressing you out while you are on vacation, kind of your own emotional labour and self-regulation (this is assuming you don't have a boss pressuring you.) Pushing it onto others isn't addressing the core issue, it's just pushing it onto others.
On a human level I have a lot of sympathy but on a systemic issue I think another way to deal with it for Cory would be to set an auto responder, let the email pile up, and then schedule work time to deal with it. Now it may be that because he works 2+ jobs he can't do that but that might point to other issues.
posted by warriorqueen at 6:15 AM on December 18, 2020 [6 favorites]
Once again, this depends on the nature of your work. For example, at some points in my career I've had to send information on behalf of other people, like "get this information to this person please" or say, agendas for upcoming meetings, board documents, etc. Contracts. Changes of dates and venues. Requests for information that can wait some time but not forever.
This may shock you but also, not all people who get information from each other share the same file server or systems.
Yesterday I was more eh whatever but today the privilege here is weighing on me. Dealing with email is both labour and maybe, if your growing inbox is stressing you out while you are on vacation, kind of your own emotional labour and self-regulation (this is assuming you don't have a boss pressuring you.) Pushing it onto others isn't addressing the core issue, it's just pushing it onto others.
On a human level I have a lot of sympathy but on a systemic issue I think another way to deal with it for Cory would be to set an auto responder, let the email pile up, and then schedule work time to deal with it. Now it may be that because he works 2+ jobs he can't do that but that might point to other issues.
posted by warriorqueen at 6:15 AM on December 18, 2020 [6 favorites]
Info updates go in documentation or aren't that important.
Disagree - when something is updated infrequently, you should let people know when it is updated, so they don't have to check every time.
posted by soelo at 11:38 AM on December 18, 2020
Disagree - when something is updated infrequently, you should let people know when it is updated, so they don't have to check every time.
posted by soelo at 11:38 AM on December 18, 2020
A luxury I don't have and would like to try, but the consequences could be harmful.
posted by cparkins at 3:04 PM on December 18, 2020
posted by cparkins at 3:04 PM on December 18, 2020
If I don't get to completely forget that I even have a job during my vacation, it's not a vacation.
I like the idea that someone returning from two weeks off would have to shown how the phones work, set up computer passwords and all the rest, just like a new hire.
Or maybe four days into your vacation you’re sitting on a beach in Bali, and a fellow vacationer asks you what you do for a living. “I’m.... I’m not quite sure.”
posted by ricochet biscuit at 4:19 PM on December 18, 2020 [8 favorites]
I like the idea that someone returning from two weeks off would have to shown how the phones work, set up computer passwords and all the rest, just like a new hire.
Or maybe four days into your vacation you’re sitting on a beach in Bali, and a fellow vacationer asks you what you do for a living. “I’m.... I’m not quite sure.”
posted by ricochet biscuit at 4:19 PM on December 18, 2020 [8 favorites]
I like the idea that someone returning from two weeks off would have to shown how the phones work, set up computer passwords and all the rest, just like a new hire.
I must admit to having had a bit of a run of forgetting my work password after holidays and needing to get it reset by IT...
posted by knapah at 6:34 AM on December 19, 2020 [1 favorite]
I must admit to having had a bit of a run of forgetting my work password after holidays and needing to get it reset by IT...
posted by knapah at 6:34 AM on December 19, 2020 [1 favorite]
The job I left a few years ago was so niche that I was literally the only person on the planet with that job title. (The job had been created a decade or so earlier, so my two predecessors shared this curious distinction.) The position encompassed a bewildering variety of responsibilities and I know that in a similar organization in another country, my counterpart was three different people for different aspects of the job.
People used to see my business card and occasionally inquire what exactly it was I did. It pleased me to respond, “You know, it’s never actually been made clear to me.”
posted by ricochet biscuit at 6:59 AM on December 19, 2020 [1 favorite]
People used to see my business card and occasionally inquire what exactly it was I did. It pleased me to respond, “You know, it’s never actually been made clear to me.”
posted by ricochet biscuit at 6:59 AM on December 19, 2020 [1 favorite]
« Older "...if you’re wealthy and ignorant enough, life... | Landmark ruling that toxic fumes killed... Newer »
This thread has been archived and is closed to new comments
posted by Nelson at 10:10 AM on December 16, 2020 [35 favorites]