We are packed and finishing the final touches on leaving Los Angeles. My email bouncer is on (with a few remaining loopholes for those who I owe stuff to before I leave… those will close tomorrow). We will then begin driving east via the 10, do the family thing for the holidays, and then run off for a proper vacation in Costa Rica before landing in Boston mid-January. What this translates to is:<\/p>\n
No email will be received by danah’s ornery INBOX between December 11 and January 19!<\/b><\/p>\n
For those who are unaware of my approach to vacation… I believe that email eradicates any benefits gained from taking a vacation by collecting mold and spitting it back out at you the moment you return. As such, I’ve trained my beloved INBOX to reject all email during vacation. I give it a little help in the form of a .procmail file that sends everything directly to \/dev\/null. The effect is very simple. You cannot put anything in my queue while I’m away (however lovingly you intend it) and I come home to a clean INBOX. Don’t worry… if you forget, you’ll get a nice note from my INBOX telling you to shove off, respect danah’s deeply needed vacation time, and try again after January 19. It’s sick, twisted, and counter to the always-on culture that we live in. But it’s me.<\/p>\n
I’ve received a lot of feedback in the last week about my approach to email while on vacation. I’ve been commended and accused of being a self-righteous bitch. I particularly love the folks who tell me to get a Blackberry. (For those who don’t know me, I have a Sidekick and an iPhone.) I normally check email all day long and when I’m in full swing, I receive 500-700 personally addressed emails per day in addition to mailing lists. There’s no way that this is manageable when I’m going away for a month. There’s no way that I could address this much email in the first month of arriving in Boston. Also, I learned ages ago that it’s better to declare email bankruptcy than to fool myself or others into believing that I can manage the unmanageable. I announce my email sabbatical a few weeks ahead of time so that folks know what’s coming. Perhaps I misjudged how folks would take my email sabbatical. Personally, I think it’s pretty rude that folks think that the asynchronicity of email gives them the right to pile things onto my plate like a huge to-do list. But it appears that many think I’m the rude one for demanding folks to wait while I’m on vacation.<\/p>\n
I’m also shocked by how many folks are completely addicted to their email. I have to admit that email sabbaticals are very much like a meditation retreat for me. It’s all about letting go. And gosh darn it, it feels mighty fine to do this.<\/p>\n
Anyhow, my apologies to those who think I have no right to take a vacation or beg a reprieve from the onslaught of emails from well-intended strangers. I don’t mean to offend. But I do mean to give myself the break that I desperately need in order to come back refreshed, rejuvenated, and ready to tackle the next big thing.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
We are packed and finishing the final touches on leaving Los Angeles. My email bouncer is on (with a few remaining loopholes for those who I owe stuff to before I leave… those will close tomorrow). We will then begin driving east via the 10, do the family thing for the holidays, and then run […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_s2mail":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[321],"tags":[378],"class_list":["post-2029","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-my-life","tag-email-vacation"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.zephoria.org\/thoughts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2029","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.zephoria.org\/thoughts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.zephoria.org\/thoughts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.zephoria.org\/thoughts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.zephoria.org\/thoughts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2029"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.zephoria.org\/thoughts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2029\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2211,"href":"https:\/\/www.zephoria.org\/thoughts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2029\/revisions\/2211"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.zephoria.org\/thoughts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2029"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.zephoria.org\/thoughts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2029"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.zephoria.org\/thoughts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2029"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}