Here is danah boyd’s idea of a vacation: She hits the road, and while she’s away, she programs her email to refuse any new messages. Any emails sent to her address during her holidays go straight to the trash folder. She never sees them, and it’s like they never happened. When she comes back to work, she sits down to an empty inbox, and doesn’t have to play catch-up to a pile of old messages.
She calls this an email sabbatical.
danah chatted with Nora about why she does it, why she loves it, and how you can do it too. danah is a social media researcher with Microsoft. The edited version of this interview will air on the June 23 & 27 episode of Spark, but you can listen to the full interview below, or download it.
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Image from Joi
June 24th, 2009 at 7:31 pm
Fantastic! After just returning from vacation and having to take 2 full days to deal with accumulated emails, I LOVE this idea. Will definitely use in future.
June 24th, 2009 at 7:49 pm
Reminds me of Jeff Bezos' comment about needing to know how to "turn off" in an always-on world.
I wonder if, as we become more and more of a 24-hour society, if these sorts of techniques will filter down to the every-day level, i.e., disabling voice mail for the weekend, etc.
July 10th, 2009 at 6:03 am
Interesting idea… but i normally delete after a small vacation ~ 500 mails manually, fly through another 100 in a quarter of hour and then read the rest who is interesting for me. The whole procedure to get me up to date is max one hour.
August 19th, 2009 at 5:21 pm
Ideal for rude and disorganised people.