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 currently the Director of Technology for Do Space in Omaha, NE. Michael has been training librarians in technology for the past twenty years and has also been a public library trustee, a bookstore manager for a library friends group, a reference librarian, serials cataloger, technology consultant, and bookseller since earning his MLS in 1995 from the University at Albany’s School of Information Science and Policy. Michael has also written dozens of articles for various journals and magazines and his fourteenth book, Emerging Technologies: A Primer for Librarians (w/ Jennifer Koerber) was published in May 2015 and more books are on the way. In his spare time he blogs at travelinlibrarian.info, runs The Collector’s Guide to Dean Koontz Web site, takes many, many photos, and typically reads more than 100 books a year.
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