Strategies for coping with holiday email deluge

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Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.

Hello and welcome to Working It.

I’m Bethan, the FT’s deputy work and careers editor, standing in for Isabel this week.

I spent much of the last month away from the office, on a brief sabbatical. It was wonderful: I travelled, gathered inspiration for future projects and brushed up on my language skills. I’ve returned with my enthusiasm for life and work reinvigorated.

Less invigorating, however, were the 3,000 odd emails I returned to. It got me thinking about how technology makes taking a proper break from work more difficult. More on that below.

If you have tips or tricks on how to manage your inbox on your return to the office — or in the day to day deluge — I would love to hear. Email me at bethan.staton@ft.com.

Logging off to log back on?

As it’s the Easter holidays in the UK, many Working It readers will be setting their out-of-office (OOO) replies this week. How you approach them is, I think, revealing. Are you the type to log off completely, or keep replying as if you never left? Or do you just lurk quietly in your own inbox?

I tend to approve of an all-out strategy: an OOO that makes clear you won’t see the email (or even that you’ll delete it) and asks the sender to try again when you’re back. That gives you a true break. It spares you wading through thousands of emails on your return — a task that is both boring and carries the risk of missing something. And it manages the expectations of the sender, making it clear they shouldn’t wait for a reply.

I am not alone in this. In 2014, German carmaker Daimler introduced a function to auto-delete emails received while employees were on vacation, with a notification to the sender. Arianna Huffington’s company Thrive Global introduced a similar policy in 2017 in order, Huffington wrote, to free staff from the anxiety of “a mounting pile of emails waiting for you on your return — the stress of which mitigates the benefits of disconnecting in the first place.”

Work-life consultant Joe Robinson is also on a mission to help us properly switch off. In a small survey of 400 workers last year, he found only 16 per cent never checked email on vacation, while 38 per cent checked once a day or more. Around 95 per cent were supportive of Daimler’s system.

Robinson sees the need to check email on holiday through an unusual lens — that of unchecked impulse control. I hadn’t heard it framed quite this way before, but it makes sense. “Technology can be an addiction,” he told me. “The more you check email the more you have to . . . People know they can’t stop checking, but they don’t know why.”

In other words, checking in on office correspondence by the pool may feel conscientious or hardworking. But it could be driven by baser instincts — the same subconscious tics that also make us check, say, Instagram compulsively. Many of us are well aware of the corrosive effect of these habits on our concentration. Could succumbing to the impulse to check email on holiday reinforce behaviours that make it harder to focus at work?

Robinson thinks so. Logging off properly on holiday and checking less after hours and even throughout the working day, “puts you in control,” he says. “you’re setting the terms of engagement”.

A non-scientific look at articles on holiday working suggests there has been a wider shift towards Robinson’s support for fully logging off.

Former FT management columnist Lucy Kellaway was one of those to change her mind. In 2013 she offered readers the stern advice that “you ought to check your messages when you are away”, and predicted the “worliday” — a mix of holiday and work — would become the “future for most professional workers”. Yet just a year later, she came out in favour of Daimler’s uncompromising auto-delete, after observing the stress reaction provoked by an email notification on holiday.

Kellaway’s takedowns of the reasons we give ourselves for answering emails on holiday are instructive — and range from a delusion that we are indispensable at work, to the gnawing fear that we are not. If you are looking at this while you’re on holiday I recommend giving it a read — it may even give you an excuse to log off.

Five top stories from the world of work

1. Ending low pay: how UK business has met demands to boost wages: April marks the first quarter century of the UK minimum wage. This piece looks carefully about how businesses made it work.

2. Morgan Stanley to stay in Canary Wharf for another 14 years: The London financial hub has been hit by changes as working patterns change post-pandemic. Here’s the latest development.

3. Commuting is back — but not as we knew it: Full of data, anecdotes and some lovely photos, this long piece digs into how travel to work has changed since the pandemic.

4. Zen and the art of the zoned-out commute: I loved this column on the rarely acknowledged pleasures of the Bakerloo line and learning to see the small joys in daydreaming and empty time.

5. For young people, the job search has never been so miserable: Even if you’re not under 30 this column — which shows the dehumanising and hopeless reality of an automated recruitment system — should ring alarm bells.

One more thing . . . 

It’s always worth keeping an eye on the events run by FT Live, which bring together some of the smartest minds on work in discussions that are often both inspirational and useful.

At the end of this month my colleague Andrew Hill is chairing a free hybrid event with recruitment company Stepstone, on attracting and retaining global talent. He’ll be joined by Auma Obama, journalist and founder of Sauti Kuu Foundation, International Labour Organization macroeconomist Ekkehard Ernst, and Sebastian Dettmers, chief executive of The Stepstone Group.