Last week I was on vacation at Bribie Island with my family.
[Aside: this is the location of my profile picture you can see to the right].
We stayed in a house with, thankfully, no internet access.
I don't have a phone.
I could have gone to the local library or to McDonalds to access the internet.
But, why spoil a good holiday?
I set up my email with an "out of office" auto-reply. When I came back to work 2 days ago I went through the 140 messages in about 20 minutes.
This was incredibly efficient.
Most were deleted. About a dozen were about science or some admin. tasks requiring action.
I set up one delayed post on my blog during my absence.
I survived. My colleagues survived. My students survived. My friends survived. My collaborators survived. Bureaucrats survived.
Most things can wait.
I benefited from not having the distraction or of thinking about things I would have to do when I got back.
I find a greater challenge is turning off email for a few hours during the day. I need to keep working on it.
No comments:
Post a Comment