Picture it; sitting pool side with a cool fruity drink.  Your family is with you, the sun is out, and the temperature is 75 degrees.  It’s a beautiful picture, isn’t it?  But let’s look a little closer, as you look around the pool, half of the people are staring at their Blackberrys checking email and clicking away.  What happened to being able to unplug while on vacation!?

I recently took a trip and was able to let it all go, without stressing out that the world was ending back at the office by just doing a couple simple things:

Set proper expectations

Make sure that people understand when you will be out of the office and what types of things that they should contact you for.  It is almost as if we feel like we have to apologize for going on vacation these days, so we tell people to call us if they need anything.  The fact is if we have the right people working with us, the world should be in fine shape without our wisdom for a few days or a week  - so only emergencies should be sent in your direction.  You might even want to define what an emergency is in your organization so it’s not up to interpretation.

Set your out of office on voice mail and email

When you do this, don’t say you will be checking messages or have limited access.  Tell people that you will be unavailable.  It’s OK for you to go away for a few days, you should be able to enjoy it without having to check messages.

Use Outlook rules

Since it is hard for some of us to unplug and not check messages on our iPhones and Blackberrys even when we set good expectations, you can create yourself a rule in Outlook that only high priority emails will be sent to your phone.  Let the other stuff build up in a folder somewhere to be cleaned out when you return.  A friend recently offered a great thought: “Email is like wine, it ages quickly”.  Most of the stuff in the folder will be out of date before you ever see it.  You’ll be able to delete it when you return.  To setup a basic rule to move normal importance mail to a different folder than the inbox, do the following in Outlook 2007:

1. Click on Tool, Rules and Alerts
2. Click on New Rule and the rule wizard appears
3. Select “Check message when they arrive” under the “Start from a Blank Rule” section, Click Next
4. Check “Marked as Importance” and when it appears at the bottom, click the word “Importance” and select “Normal” from the dropdown.  Click Next.
5. Check “move it to a specified folder” and when it appears at the bottom, click on “specified folder”.  Select the folder you want to move mail to or create a new one for this purpose.  Click Next.
6. Continue through the wizard for any other exceptions you want and to name your rule.
7. Remember to turn the rule on when you go on vacation.

At the end of the day it all comes down to expectations.  If you set the expectation that you are available, people will treat you that way.  With these quick tips, you can also control your urge to check messages every time you see the number of “new” ones increase.

Tags: business success tips, resource time management, small business, small business concerns, technology resource for small business, time planning

This entry was posted on Tuesday, June 1st, 2010 at 3:18 pm by Michael Giuffrida and is filed under CEO, Technology Tips. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.