Taking time off…line
Posted by Françoise Blin on 16/12/2010
Four more days, four very busy days, and then I am taking some time off for the Christmas break. I am actually taking some time offline. No email, no Twitter, no Facebook for three weeks. At least, this is the plan!
This is something I had wanted to do for a long time but never really managed to achieve it. I am quite good at ignoring messages for a while, filing them in an organised way so that I don’t forget to take any required action when I go back to work. But then, I spend days sorting out the important from the trivial, wishing I never took some leave, and feeling harassed by the sheer volume of messages clogging my inbox, most of them obsolete by the time I read them. When I read danah boyd‘s blog post “I am offline!“, that was it. Her post was the push I needed.
I am not as organised as she is, though. I haven’t given much notice to colleagues and students, but I expect that there won’t be too much traffic over the Christmas period… And I will have hopefully cleared my desk before I take off…line.
So from Monday 20 December until Monday 10 January, I will be offline. All incoming emails will be redirected to a “trash” folder, and I will not read them. I will not try to catch up when I get back to work, so any important message will have to be resent on or after 11 January. On my return to work, I should be fully refreshed and ready to take on whatever lands on my desk.
In the meantime, I wish everybody a peaceful and happy break. Do take one if you can!
