The short version
- Do not start with the inbox. The inbox is a record of things that happened in the order they happened, which is the least useful order.
- Start with decisions made in your absence, then open questions, then what is due this week. Inbox last, and mostly archived.
- Sixty minutes is enough for a two week absence if you go in that order. Two days is what it takes if you start at the top of your email.
- Whatever you had to dig for is a gap in the coverage plan. Write it down on day one, while you still remember.
The first day back undoes a good portion of the holiday. Most people open their email, work forward chronologically, and spend two days reconstructing the last fortnight from fragments, arriving at Thursday with a clear inbox and no idea what actually changed.
Why not the inbox
An inbox is chronological and undifferentiated. A message from day two about something already resolved sits next to one from day nine that changes your quarter, and they look identical.
It is also mostly obsolete. In a two week absence, a large share of what arrived has been handled, superseded, or has simply expired. Reading it in order means reading a long argument whose conclusion is in the last message.
So invert the order. Start from the current state and work backwards only where you need to.
The 60 minute order
| Minutes | What | Question you are answering |
|---|---|---|
| 0 to 15 | Decisions made in your absence | What is now true that was not true when I left? |
| 15 to 30 | Open questions waiting on you | What has been stopped, waiting for me specifically? |
| 30 to 45 | What is due in the next seven days | What will go wrong this week if I do nothing? |
| 45 to 60 | Inbox, newest first | Is there anything here the first three steps missed? |
The order is the method. Each step gives you the context to read the next one faster, which is why the inbox takes fifteen minutes at the end instead of two days at the start.
Decisions made without you
This is the block people skip and the one that causes the most trouble later. Something was decided in week one of your absence, you never registered it, and three weeks later you contradict it in front of a client.
For each decision, you need three things: what was decided, who decided it, and what it means for something you own. If your team keeps a decision log this is a five minute read. If not, it is an awkward series of conversations, which is itself an argument for the log. See the decision log template.
Resist re opening them. A decision made competently in your absence should stand, even where you would have chosen differently, unless it is both important and reversible. Overturning delegated decisions on return is the fastest way to ensure nobody decides anything next time. See the decision list you write before leaving.
Then the inbox, briefly
Newest first, and be ruthless. Anything older than a week that nobody has chased is not urgent, by demonstration. Archive in bulk and let the genuinely important resurface, which it will.
Some people send a short note on their first morning: "I am back, I have archived everything from the last two weeks, please resend anything still live." It feels rude and it is honest, and people generally prefer it to a reply arriving eleven days after they needed one.
Make the next return easier
On day one, while it is fresh, write down what you had to dig for. Every item is a gap in the coverage plan: a decision nobody logged, a question that waited because nobody was named, a client who was not told who to contact.
Then fix the underlying thing, which is that the record of what happened lives in fragments across messages, calls and people's memories. This is what StandIn is built for. Each day, each person spends about ninety seconds on a brief: what moved, what is open, what is blocked, what is next, mostly drafted from the work itself. Coming back, you can ask what changed on an account, or what was decided about the export, and get an answer from those briefs, in your colleagues' words, with a source under each one. It never guesses, and when the answer is not there it says so and names who to ask. The first three blocks of the hour above stop being archaeology. See how teams use it, and picking a project back up after two weeks.
Common Questions
Should I take a catch up day with no meetings?
A half day is usually right. A full protected day tends to get eaten anyway, and an hour done in the right order does most of the work.
What about checking email during the holiday to avoid the pile?
It converts two days of catching up into two weeks of low grade working, which is a bad trade. It also teaches your team that messaging you on leave works.
How do I catch up after several months, such as parental leave?
Same order, longer blocks, and add a fifth: what has changed about the people. Reporting lines, new joiners, who left. That is the part a document will not tell you and the part that matters most.
Should someone brief me on my first morning?
A thirty minute call with whoever covered you, held after you have done the first two blocks rather than before, is the single highest value meeting of the week. Do the reading first so the questions are specific.
When you're off, your StandIn is on.
It answers your teammates' questions from work you've already done, in your words, with a source under every answer.