Approaching my 2-year workiversary, I found myself with an abundance of "use or lose" PTO days. I had enough days for three consecutive weeks off and I was not going to let them go to waste! So I built myself a Mini Spring Sabbatical. While it was not my intent heading into the year, taking an extended time off was a lovely break that allowed me to recharge and come back refreshed and with new ideas.
Never having taken that much time away from a job before, I was curious how it would go for two reasons:
1) My ability to unplug and resist the temptation to check emails, chats, and requests.
This went surprisingly well and I was proud of myself! The red notification dots on my phone apps started to stress me out, so I moved my entire work folder to the last screen of my iPhone to hide it. The notification previews from Outlook and Zoom gave me a quick blink of what was happening without having to fully open and read anything. Even though I would have personally felt better keeping up with the messages, I committed to opening nothing.
2) The volume of communication to weed through when I got back.
My time off corresponded with a more complicated week of the year, so I was concerned that I would come back to a lot of urgent questions while at the same time having a lot of catching up to do. I was also curious how many emails, chats, and requests I would receive during this time and how many would still be pertinent when I returned. I know I get a lot of messages every day, but I had never tracked it before.
Methodology: I took two seconds out of each day to track messages, with the intent of using the data to experiment in Flourish -- a data viz tool that I had been intending to become more proficient in and play around with! By screenshotting the app notifications on my phone daily, I logged the volume of messages of each type each day in a Google Sheet.
After visualizing the data, some interesting trends emerged:
- For the most part, I received the most chats per day. This was not surprising because my employer has both work-related chats and fun chat channels. When I came back, none of my chats were actionable.
- Messages of all types peaked on Wednesday 5/31. Again, this was not surprising given the timing of the broadcast month and Memorial Day holiday. However, I was surprised to find that Wednesdays were the highest communication day of each week while I was gone. Wednesdays are the day I try to hold as "no meetings" to work on larger-longer-term projects, so Wednesdays feel calm to me, even if I'm receiving a lot of messages.
- Only 11% of total messages were actionable, and all of these were emails. This was even being generous with what I considered actionable, for example, RSVPing to a meeting invite, sending congratulations on an anniversary or promotion, or reading an update. This illuminated how many messages I am sent "for awareness" that have little to no impact on my daily work.
I used my data to create a short Flourish Story. Note: This is TRULY for my own entertainment and learning purposes, NOT NOT NOT to call anyone out for emailing me during my OOO! :) This story presents the volume of messages in an animated (engaging!), interactive (quizzes!), and fun (gifs!) way. I enjoyed playing around with the many different visualization starting points, learning how to update each with my own data, and connecting them into a story. Check it out:
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