Out Of Office

, I want to talk about out of office. This has come up a couple of times this week.

 

There was a tweet that I saw that said, European  out of offices. "I'm away camping for the summer email again in September". American out of offices. I have left the office for two hours to undergo kidney surgery, but you can reach me on my cell any time. And I sent this round quite a few friends and it's heartbreakingly true. And then something else happened. I sent out an email to my mailing list about an offer that I was doing and how things were going.

 

And I said, you know, if you need anything, just just send an email, respond if you have any questions. And that goes to my personal email address. And I happen to have an office on my email address at the time because I was taking a couple of days off. And so I always have an out of office when I am not going to be responding in a timely fashion. And I got an email back saying, of course, you are taking time off.

 

Can you possibly how can you not think about other people you shouldn't be taking time off when you've asked people to respond to X, Y and Z, and this made me feel guilty for like a split second and sad. And it was because this person was emailing out of frustration that they felt they couldn't take time off without losing pay or benefits or maybe they didn't get sick pay and with the.

 

Tweet that I was talking about, where Americans out of offices feel like I'm doing this thing, but, you know, you can reach me any time, the feeling of having to be available at all times, whether you are an employee or a business owner. The pressure is huge and it's not healthy.

 

And I was also giving support to a company in California this week, and they also had the same thing. Everyone was experiencing burnout. They couldn't set boundaries between work time and non-work time can take. There was one person who wanted to take a week vacation off and basically got told no, and they could only take three days off. But then that wasn't communicated to the rest of the team that they were on vacation. And then it looked like the person had left or been like fired suspiciously.

 

It's a very weird situation. So my question to you is, what do you do in your life or what can you do to create a life where you can do more of the European style out of the office rather than the American style out of the office? Can you split up your vacation so that it's now one long weekend, a month or every two months and you work a different job, can you work towards a different job?

 

Can you work towards working for yourself? I'm currently in the process of changing how my business works for various reasons. And this is one of the things that has come up is wanting more control over my calendar, not feeling that I'm doing things last minute for everybody because that causes me more stress and more like to make a mistake. To be fair, more pressure. You put people under there's a certain amount of pressure that is good and healthy, stress and pressure.

 

And there is a set amount that isn't. And what is out of office look like, because it doesn't have to be out of office? I'm not here. It could just be I check my emails once every 24 hours or I check my emails at nine a.m. and 4:00 p.m. Anything else? You know, text me or give another way if it's urgent for someone to contact. It doesn't have to be out of office, per say. But reducing your instant availability could do wonders for your mental health, the feeling of having to respond instantaneously to everything, whether it is CELAC or email or messenger or or Instagram, Deanne's and Facebook, all of those things takes a huge toll.

 

So what can you do to help set some boundaries about how quickly you respond to things? Because people that I've coached have found most of the time nothing is on fire and desperately urgent. And if it is, then you know that and you can fix it. But most messages, emails, etc do not need to be responded to instantaneously. You can get back in an hour, three hours, four hours, 24 hours. So just take a look and see what you can do to set some boundaries around maybe your emails or not having the notifications on your phone so you can be a little bit more out of office.

 

Thanks for listening. This is Janice@thecareerintrovert.com helping you build your brand and get hired. Have a great rest of your week.