I Unplugged for 10 Days: Part 2

Below is an account of my attempt to unplug completely from email and the internet for 10 days while on a stay-cation.  For those of you who haven’t heard the term, a stay-cation is a local vacation.

My Approach

I thought about unplugging from email about one week to 10 days before my official vacation.  The more I thought about unplugging, the more excited I got.  I not only wanted to make this a project that I blogged about (after the fact of course), I wanted to make this a movement!  I was REALLY serious about sticking to my decision to unplug. 

I knew I’d have to plan a bit before THE BIG UNPLUGGING occurred, so this is what I did:

The Date

Before all this crazy thinking began, months before I had booked a speaking gig in New Jersey on April 21^st, and had planned to visit my best friend Lori (yes, we have the same first name!) in the Philadelphia suburbs afterwards.  Because of this, I had already planned to take off the rest of my speaking day and the day after that which was Earth Day as well as Good Friday.  I would be watching my boyfriend John’s young sons during the middle of the following week while he was on a business trip, so I figured it would be easier to take those day’s off, too.  As a result, I just opted to take off from April 22 and not return to the office until May 1^st. 

My unplugging officially began on Friday morning April 22^nd, so my unplugging time ran over 2 weekends and I only lost 6 official work days. 

It helped that my time off was right after Easter/Passover, so I figured others might be on vacation and the demands on my time – and my email – might be a little less.  It also helped that I didn’t have an event coming up the following week. 

Other Actions

1.  I was worried that my email box would get overloaded, so I started unsubscribing to junk email I knew I would never read. 

2.  At least one week before my vacation, I alerted current clients as well as regular clients who didn’t currently have an event on the books about my vacation and plans to unplug.  Nobody was concerned and I think a few were envious.  They all supported my endeavor.    

3.  As I’m sure you suspect, I prepared an automatic out of office email and indicated that the office would be shut down for the week and that we would not be checking email until we returned.  I added that if it was a true emergency, people could call my mobile number.  Otherwise, they would have to wait until May 2^nd.  I did the same for office voice mail.   

My next post, which I'll make later today, will include a report from Day 1 of unplugging!