Should you check emails on vacation or face a ‘tidal wave’ of messages later? These CEOs have some ideas

Should you check email on vacation or face a tsunami of messages once you’re back at the office?

For workers at war with their inboxes, neither is a great option.  

That’s why many people choose something in the middle. But even monitoring email on holiday “is almost always a bad move,” said Zachary Weiner, CEO of the marketing company Emerging Insider Communications.

“Once that Pandora’s box is open, you usually find yourself having to respond, having to put out fires, unintentionally spending hours and hours of time,” he said.

Still, some 84% of white-collar workers do it, and more than 70% are triaging messages from three or more platforms — like Teams, Slack and WhatsApp — said work-life balance consultant Joe Robinson.

“Everyone is dog paddling out there in this tidal wave,” he said. “We’re doing everything wrong. That’s why everybody’s so frazzled.”

Robinson launched an “Email Intervention Campaign” earlier this month to deal with issues like “vacation email panic,” he told CNBC Travel.

According to a survey of workers he conducted in April:

• 25% have skipped a vacation to avoid email backlog when returning to the office
• 34% have shortened vacations for the same reason
• 87% favor a company policy to disconnect after work, except during emergencies

One company doing it right is the Mercedes-Benz Group, which lets employees auto-delete incoming email messages while they’re on vacation, he said. (Out-of-office messages alert senders that messages have been deleted, too.)

According to Robinson, 95% of respondents said they would support a similar policy at their companies.

Robinson advises companies to create defined email policies, ideally ones which give workers permission not to check email on vacation.

Gates Little, CEO of the U.S.-based lender altLine Sobanco, agreed, adding leadership should set the example.     

“If your boss is always answering emails while away, don’t you think you’d be expected to do the same?” he said. “Whereas a boss who preaches work-life balance will set an example by not responding to emails until they return.”

Stanislav Khilobochenko, a vice president at the customer services company Clario, uses filters to distinguish urgent emails from irrelevant ones. He said, “I set up as many filters as possible so emails that arrive while I’m away are already sorted by priority.”  

Kim Rohrer, principal people partner at human resources company Oyster, said she discovered her top email pro-tip during her 24-day honeymoon in 2011.  

She sets up two filters:

• Send all mail to the archive and mark as read
• Send all mail with “README” in the subject to a special “README” folder

Via autoreply, she notifies senders she’s archiving all emails during her vacation dates. She refers urgent emails to a colleague, but asks that non-urgent emails “you’d like me to read … upon my return” be resent to her with “README” in the subject line.

“I once checked, and I had received over 3,000 emails after a two-week vacation, but only had four emails in my ‘read later’ folder,” she told CNBC Travel, which “just goes to show how much false urgency impacts our workloads.”

4. Mute notifications

To tune out work, mute email notifications and messenger systems, said Christy Pyrz, chief marketing officer of the supplement company Paradigm Peptides.

“Do yourself the favor,” she said. “Mute the apps.”

But travel editor Mrigaa Sethi goes a step further. “Delete the apps! Email, Slack, Teams … be absolute. Don’t leave the door partway open.”

She said she understands the urge to check email daily to prevent email backlog, but “I know myself well enough that even the slightest bit of news will make my brain whir.”