Screening your calls is not the same thing, unless you don’t have voicemail and/or decline to call back when you are available. If your callers know that the ball is in your court then they don’t have to plan to call you again to try to catch you in.

Would you throw all your paper mail in the trash as soon as you walk in the door on the grounds that you shouldn’t have to scan through two weeks’ worth of mail when today’s mail will soon arrive?

For those who are less geeky, set up your vacation message in your email client and simply have all of your messages forwarded to the Trash. Most likely, you will have to delete your Trash when you return unless your system has a mechanism for deleting anything sent to the trash.

Excellent idea – you get full benefit from your break, and others learn that they probably didn’t need to send that mail anyway.

Let’s make the e-mail break an international convention!

Don

Yup. Cut the string. Be it, Love it.

I think this is an excellent approach.

Speaking to a parallel issue – I am probably older than most here, and only recently (about 15 months ago) obtained a cell phone when I was forced to move to a location where it would have been prohibitively expensive to have my land line installed.

(I always said that I was not a busy executive, doctor, lawyer, drug-dealer, prostitute, or pimp, and thus had no need of such a device.)

I have to admit it has some advantages, but I’m not sure these compensate for the susceptibility to be asynchronously interrupted during activities like driving in heavy traffic or dangerous road conditions, taking care of personal needs in the rest room, enjoying a quiet meal and conversation with a friend, engaging in a work-related discussion with an employer, etc. I reject any implied imperative to be continuously available – especially since I lived adequately for roughly 60 years without such “benefits”.

It is shocking but, sadly, not entirely surprising that you would be characterized as a “self-righteous b*tch”. To my mind, it is, rather, that correspondent who displayed insufferable arrogance and contempt for your fundamental rights of privacy and self-determination.

Alcides,

I would expect the effect you suggest to be limited by the countertendency that only those items which were still seen as important after several days or weeks of “cooling off time” would still be sent.

-Steve

5 week vacations, 36 hour work weeks, how did I manage before in the states?!