The Secret Sauce: Post Vacation Ketchup
- Posted August 17th, 2009
- Filed under: How We Do It, Using BatchBook
I recently spent a few weeks vacationing with my husband, 3 kids and a rotating stream of relatives and friends at our family retreat on a tiny island north of Portland, Maine. Each day wondering if we should sail, climb the rocks, play on the beach, boogie board, collect starfish, hunt crabs, fish, play tennis, eat mussels, clams or lobsters, or all of the above. At BatchBlue we put a high premium on family time. We talk a bit about mandatory vacations in our Virtual Office Blue Paper, but a customer wrote in recently with the comment, “it is great that you know how to disengaged, but do you find it hard to re-engage?” It’s hard to benefit from the personal time if you are worried about the mounting workload, so I thought I would share a few of my tips on quickly catching up on the waiting backlog.
Here are a few of the things I did to quickly get back up to BatchBlue speed::
- Read staff meeting agendas – ok, alright, I did this one while on vacation. Not to prove I work harder than anyone else, but just because leaving your business for a few weeks is like leaving your kids for a few weeks. You can’t not check in once in a while. So on staff meeting days I would check our company wiki and read through the notes that the team had taken during the meeting. Great way to peek in without being noticed.
- Search of the daily staff updates – at BatchBlue each staff person sends around a daily report on what they are working on. I set up a filter in Gmail to collect these in a folder while I was gone, so it was pretty easy to quickly read through them chronologically and get a sense of what progress was made while I was out.
- Click back through the history of my Twitter feed on the BatchBook dashboard to get a sense of what the Twitterverse was saying about BatchBlue, SBBuzz, or me.
- I already have a “BatchBlue” folder in my Google Reader where I subscribe to a number of company related RSS feeds. So all in one place I get a quick glimpse of the following:
- BatchBlue Blog posts written by the staff while I was gone.
- BatchBook comments or notes added to contact records in BatchBook. For the most part these were silly remarks by staff about each other, but there is something comforting about catching up on some of the inside company jokes, as well.
- BatchBlue communications including all e-mails, phone calls, Twitter messages or other communications sent out or received by BatchBlue staff. I admit I would flip back into BatchBook reading most of these – such a great way to remind myself who some of the e-mails recipients are (thank you social media SuperTag!).
- Forum posts showed me all of the BatchBook questions and suggestions our customers posted in our online forums as well as the BatchBlue responses. I always learn something new in there.
- Hubspot Feeds are the nice messages our friends at Hubspot send telling us about anyone in the wonderful world of the Web talking about us. A little self-indulgent, but in a good way.
- And lastly there is the 200 pound gorilla: the Inbox! I learned my best trick from the Magic Fairy of Organization, Miss ChelPixie. I use the GMail Labs “Superstar” feature to do a once through of all of my outstanding e-mails and either delete them or color code them. I prioritize time sensitive messages, staff questions and customer requests. I group admin issues (mostly bills – ugh!) and personal ones. The first pass was read only – I had to get them organized first. And I did not let myself go to sleep that night until all messages were coded and all priority mail had gotten a response.
So I was able to start the week not only relaxed and refreshed, but with a comfortable sense of what I had missed and a manageable workload ahead of me. What better way to jump back on this speeding train!
