I’ve taken the plunge and have officially declared pre-emptive e-mail bankruptcy for the holidays. What this means is that I’ve set up a vacation auto-reply informing recipients that I “will not be checking or accumulating any e-mail” until January 1st. I simply do not want to get back to a mountain of e-mail that I then have to spend a good deal of time manually filtering (I don’t use any auto-filters, as I prefer to take time to reply to or file e-mails one by one). I enjoy the work I do quite a bit, and take pride in the fact that I do a quality job. Thus, the prospect of jumping right back into my projects right after break, as opposed to spending a lot of time filtering e-mail, is quite appealing to me.

The idea of declaring pre-emptive e-mail bankruptcy is not an original one of mine. It’s been discussed around the blogosphere as one way of managing stress and information overload. Two of the blogs I follow – Tim Ferriss’ and Danah Boyd’s, advocate for different forms of e-mail bankruptcy. Declaring e-mail bankruptcy pre-emptively seems to me a way of handling things honestly and responsibly. Better to declare ahead of time that communications might be lost than to find oneself in the situation of coming back from a long absence, being overwhelmed with a bloated inbox, and accidentally deleting communications that might be important.

We’ll see how this experiment goes. I hope no one gets upset with me. The real test will come, I suppose, when I try this experiment during vacation time. Folks might understand my doing this over the holidays, or will likely not even be aware of it, but on a personal vacation where others are actually working, there might be a possibility of stepping on some toes. In that case, it might be wise to inform stakeholders well ahead of time and make very clear what my intentions are. I’ll still want to consider it, though, for the sake of my own sanity and productivity.

Best wishes for the holidays, everyone. Stay safe and I’ll see you in the new year!