How to Conquer Your Email After a Vacation by Nick Douglas
Welcome back to work. While you catch up on all the emails you didn’t handle while you were gone, new emails will start coming in. Depending on your job, this emails might be your actual job responsibility or a distraction that you’re annoyingly obligated to deal with anyway. Here’s how to avoid that “Lucy in the chocolate factory” feeling as you dig through your inbox.
Keep your auto-responder on First you need to set expectations. Whether or not you take an extra day off work to recover, you should spend your first day back pretending you’re still away. Keep an auto-responder on, and imply (or flatly lie) that you’re unreachable on your first day back. When you actually do reply to some emails today, no one is going to get mad that you were surprisingly responsive.
Michael Sauers is the Director of Logan Library in Logan, UT. Prior to this he was one of the founding staff and Technology Manager for Do Space in Omaha, NE. After earning his MLS in 1995 from the University at Albany's School of Information Science and Policy Michael spent his first 20 years as a librarian training other librarians in technology along with time as a public library trustee, a bookstore manager for a library friends group, a reference librarian, a technology consultant, and a bookseller. He has written dozens of articles for various journals and magazines and has published 14 books ranging from library technology, blogging, Web design, and an index to a popular horror magazine. In his spare time, he blogs at TravelinLibrarian.info, runs The Collector's Guide to Dean Koontz website at CollectingKoontz.com, takes many, many photos, and typically reads more than 100 books a year.
Unless otherwise stated, all opinions are my own and are not to be considered those of the City of Logan, UT.
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