Submitted by Rona_Gura on

The Old Days

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Lifestyle

A colleague and I were recently talking about the “old days.” Back in the day, when we could leave the office at 5:00 on a Friday night and  not be reached again until Monday morning when we returned to the office. 

 

Of course that was before we had home fax machines which then morphed into email and cell phones. I never had a personal fax machine but, of course, have email and a cell phone.  And, as I am sure all of you do, I have my cell phone set up so that I see the emails as they come in. 

 

I am a true believer in the concept that we all need weekly time to disconnect and have personal time for ourselves. But with our work email coming directly to us through our cell phones, do we really take the time on the weekend to disconnect and relax? How do you handle  the weekend professional emails? Do you read them all? Do you triage? If so, how?

Comments

Shelley Simpson

I do not look at business communications from Friday after Gotham Happy Hour until Saturday afternoon. Well, sometimes I will look, but I don't answer anything that can wait. it was different back in the day when I was "on call" 24-7 and I do not miss that at all.
Daniel Schwartz

I do look at them in most cases, to at least mentally prepare for the inevitable on Monday morning. Depending on the situation, I might respond, but usually don't until Monday. With email and cell phones, one is rarely tuned out. The same can be said of when on vacation. It seems impossible not to at least look and then decide how to handle. I keep an out of office message on my email when away and my work phone, but if someone contacts me on my cell, it creates a whole different response, defending on how frequent one tries to reach me, and obviously take me out of vacation mode.

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