I'm on vacation in Hawaii, and while not totally unplugged, I have an increasing fear of my inbox upon my formal return. Dick Kaser shares a similar email story:
...I made the mistake a couple of weeks ago of retaliating against my computer. I switched it off for 3 entire days, wrote longhand in a journal again, and told my boss that I felt like a new man. Of course, that was until the day of reckoning came as several hundreds of emails rolled off the server into my laptop client...
Now, since I suddenly had 300 pending messages in my inbox, I could not get past the new messages pouring in marked "Urgent" to clear the backlog. It took a turbulent plane ride with my laptop jostling on a tray table and a long night in a hotel room to clean out the stack of incoming emails. And though I can say I am back on top of it again, I am not proud that the new man I had become was bombarded again...
I set up a Vacation Page in my company wiki, sort of a public inbox. The theory is if it is really that important it can be transparent. Or if it was important on the first day of my vacation, it may not be on the last one so they can edit it out.
The outside world is getting a vacation auto-responder email, a crude instrument for those who don't know my presence is on Jaiku and Twitter, or otherwise aggregated as a Lifestream where someone might see a vacation picture.
That was, until, I learned how sand may have enabled consumer electronics, but it hates moving parts like telephoto lenses.
Anyway, taking a real vacation either requires falling off the grid, rudely to others, or lots of cooperation with begotten collaborators until presence is richer and messaging more passive.
