I had a crazy idea the other day. What if we pretended to be on vacation to get work done?
There have been times that I’ve scheduled vacation, found people to cover for me, and turned off email. Then the appointment I had planned for was canceled so I decided to work without anyone bothering me. I was able to get so much knocked out without meetings and emails.
When you are on vacation, no one expects you to work or answer emails. This is the gateway drug to turning off your email.
When I shared this with my team they were at first confused but then extremely enthusiastic.
I call this Pseudo Vacation Days. These are days that my team will treat like vacation days for everybody outside of their team but their team understands that they will be working, undistracted.
Here are the rules for pseudo vacation days
- The first rule of pseudo vacation days is you don’t talk about pseudo vacation days- We don’t want to get busted because then this will not work.
- We need to show that this allows us to get more done for us to keep it.
- Set your email to offline
- Set your calendar as out-of-office
- Turn off all of your instant messengers (we have multiple at my company)
- Identify backups
- Post an away message
- Don’t send emails that will be received that day
- This is to handle past actions or bigger projects. Do not handle emails that are received that day.
- Work sequentially, one thing at a time for long blocks of time
- Eliminate distractions and turn off your phone for extended periods so you can really use the time to focus
- Block out 2-4 hours in the morning the next day to clear out emails received on the pseudo vacation day.
My team is implementing this on a two week rotation for every team member. Maybe you should check with your boss to see if you could try this.