Working Outside the Inbox: Returning from vacation

Vacation. The word alone strikes both a visceral and dichotomous chord in any and all who hear it. On one hand it triggers a wistful longing or deep anxiousness to get to it, but on the other hand, well that’s where things take a turn… for those of us in the corporate world, vacation means returning to an exploded inbox after a week of ignored email. It means that even as we are away from work, basking in the fact that we have no responsibilities for the week, deep down there is that knowledge and fear of what awaits us upon our return. I’m sure at least a few of us have already recoiled in horror at the thought of actually disconnecting and taking a week’s vacation.

Thankfully, a few of us in Rational Support have a tool (or rather, concept) to help us deal with that anxiety which makes returning from vacation so much less stressful: our drive to work outside of the inbox. Now, admittedly, it didn’t help me return from vacation wholly without fear, but instead, it assuaged that fear nearly immediately once I did return….

Take a moment and think about the last time you took vacation…. how many emails were waiting for your return? Two hundred? Three hundred? One thousand? Somewhere in between? Enough to make returning to work a daunting proposition I’m sure!

Well, imagine returning to the office to find only  138 total emails in your inbox! Moreso, imagine 50% of those messages being irrelevant spam/sales emails and auto-notifications. That’s what I came back to. Now, do the quick math and you’ll see that my inbox really only held 64 messages for me which required attention… even more luckily, about half of those were only informational and didn’t require any direct action. By the time Monday was over, I was nearly 100% caught up from my prior week off. Prior to our WOTI (working outside the inbox) efforts, being caught up by Monday evening would have been inconceivable; a daydreamer’s fantasy at best.

The great news? Just because my inbox was reduced substantially from prior vacations’ totals, this doesn’t mean I am privy to less information… rather, because of our heavy use of wikis, forums, and blogs, all the information I missed during my time away is still available, relevant, and searchable. Instead of digging in to my inbox to disposition emails and categorize accordingly, most of that content was now visible in my RSS reader and already categorized and dispositioned, or even handled for me via internal crowd sourcing as an effect of the networks of connections around me.

Because this information was now being shared in collaborative spaces instead of siloed inboxes, I was able to be more effective more quickly upon my return from vacation and focus on the work that really matters.

image credit: (cc) Some rights reserved by Sarah_Ackerman