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Could You Take An 'E-Mail Sabbatical'?

danah boyd, a social media researcher for Microsoft and all-around brilliant person, switches off e-mail entirely when she goes on vacation. She directs all her incoming mail to the trash, and sets her vacation auto-responder to let people sending mail know that she won't read it, and they should contact her when she returns from vacation. Could you do that? How do you handle e-mail over vacation?

In an interview with CBC Radio, boyd says she goes on these "e-mail sabbaticals" to protect her sanity and to allow her to work more effectively when she's not on vacation. She says she needs the downtime to refresh her brain.

I listened to her interview and thought there's no way I could do that — not because I'm such an important hotshot, but because of the people I'm accountable to. There are a half-dozen business associates I would not want to miss e-mail from: My boss, the CEO of the company, folks like that.

What if Apple contacts me and they're finally going to agree to my request for an interview with Steve Jobs? (Last time I interviewed jobs: About 1993. It was a phone interview. He hung up on me.)

Likewise (I thought as I was listening to the interview), while boyd (that's how she spells her name - lowercase "d" lowercase "b") takes a break from Twitter while on vacation, I keep right on Twittering. The reason: I like it.

The punchline of the interview came, for me, at the end: She talked about a recent sabbatical being six weeks. I realized then that she and I were talking about two completely different situations. Like most people in my company, I take my vacation time in one- and two-week bites. I check my personal e-mail account continuously during that time, and try to check my business account once a day, just to weed through all the garbage, take care of anything that can be done in less than two minutes, and mark the rest for handling when I get back. Handling e-mail that way during vacation makes re-entry easier and more pleasant.

But if I were gone six weeks or more? I might well take boyd's approach and just direct all my mail to the trash. Because I don't see how I could ever catch up otherwise.

I'm a huge fan of boyd's, she was a powerful voice for common sense during recent hysteria over children at risk on the Internet. Her research, summed up in a tweet-length byte: Children are at terrible risk on the Internet, but they're not being tricked or trapped into relationships with sexual predators. At-risk kids seek those relationships out.

Thanks to my colleague Jennifer Pahlka for pointing out the boyd interview on the Web 2.0 Expo Blog.

By the way, that's how she spells her name: Lowercase "d" lowercase "b."



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