For me, productivity is about doing what I have to do as quickly and efficiently as possible (without cutting corners) to leave more time to do what I want to do.

As as for the "vacation tax", I typically come back to 1,500 home e-mails (mostly mailing lists) and about 1,000 at work. It takes me typically three hours to process the whole lot (though the 2 minute rule becomes a 10 second rule for a while).

I make a point of leaving at 4:30pm every once in a while (I start at 8am) just to remind my boss that's when I'm allowed to leave, and if I'm still there at 5pm I'm working late. It's one thing working late to accomodate emergencies, but I'm not going to do it as a matter of course.

Well well!

I happen to believe there is something mightily WRONG when one can't take down time for the massive FEAR of what will await on their return!

Email huh? A blessed curse it seems!

Why can't we hang an "I'm AWAY" sign on our inboxes and then have people actually _respect_ that and NOT send emails while we're "away"?

I think perhaps it boils down to simple manners really. Why should the downtime-ee have to do all the hard yards to keep up as "punishment" for taking R & R? Why can't we value our employees/friends/collegues enough to ensure that their down time is not "taxed" to bilio on their return? A simple case of the desperate need for compassionate human resource management perhaps.

We need to respect and encourage our important others to have their much needed down time by not imposing on it. If we aim to protect down time for staff and collegues - then it can only come back to benefit us when its our turn :)

As that old nugget goes "Do unto others as you would be done by"

Mitch
(excuse the rant - this topic really fires me up *blush*)

Now here's an idea (or maybe a feature of Outlook I don't know about). Remember when you had a telephone answering machine, and you could set it to not accept messages, just play a message that told people you weren't available? Can you do that with email? "Hi, you've reached Gordon's email inbox. I won't be checking messages for 14 days, and I have not kept a copy of yours. Please make a note to resend your email in 15 days, if it is an issue of importance. Thanks."

:-)

Gordon, here's how one guy avoided the email vacation tax and reduced his total after-vacation email processing time to 2 minutes...
http://www.ericmackonline.com/ica/blogs/emonline.nsf/dx/how-to-avoid-the-e-mail-vacation-tax

My colleague (and brother) just returned from holiday. He knew he could ignore all automated emails about potential problems he got from our shared server because either they weren't important or I would have taken action on them already. Also, a project just ended a few days before, so he could ignore all emails about that as well. In other words: when you return from vacation, ask your colleagues to give you an update; it may save you from reading tens or hundreds of emails.

For those who are tempted to setup some automated out-of-office reply, please take any mailing lists you are subscribed to into account. If your email program or server sends an out-of-office reply when you get an email from a mailing list, then that automated reply may puzzle or irritate the senders as they probably have no idea who you are, or it will frustrate the mailing list owner or it will get you (temporarily) banned from that list. That all depends on the setup of that list, but you need to be careful here. Maybe it is wise to unsubscribe from one or two high-volume lists that you know you will never read all mails from.

When you return and find hundreds or thousands of emails, you can wade through it and use David's two minute rule, which you may want to shorten a bit here. Or take a tip from Mark Forster (www.markforster.net) and declare those emails a backlog. Move them all to a different folder and you'll have a clean slate in under a minute! :) Handle new incoming emails like you always do. And work on that backlog folder every day for a few days or so to get that back to zero.