Email on the the holidays and after hours- A lesson on change, leadership and followership

During my first leadership role, I developed a habit of using email to share my thoughts with my teammates. This is not necessarily a bad thing in itself, but it was more my lack of discipline, in terms of when I sent those emails, that created a problem.

I would write and send the email the moment a thought came to me. In the middle of the day, right before bed, dinnertime, Saturday afternoon, Christmas, etc.

One particular holiday, I noticed within minutes of sending a non-urgent email, one of my teammates responded back, then another, and another. This bothered me because I did not want them to respond to me on a holiday. So during our next team meeting after the holidays, I told my team that I do not expect them to respond to emails after duty hours and certainly not on holidays. My senior most advisor, the one who responded to the email first, then said…” Sir, if you decide and email is urgent and important enough to send after duty hours, we will respond to it.”

“If you seek to invite change in others…there is something that must first change in you.”

A solution: Schedule your non-urgent emails

Email is a useful tool for non-urgent communication. When used for urgent communication, it can become problematic, primarily as it forces your teammates to check it constantly to ensure they do not miss an urgent email. This is markedly inefficient and unproductive. For more thoughts on this topic see our previous post EmailTips.

Perhaps, like me, writing an email provides a way to capture your thoughts, while they come to you. Here is my suggestion… write the email, but use the “scheduled send” function to send the email for the morning of the next duty day.