Edel Coffey: Did you check your work emails over Christmas? You could suffer from FOSO

Edel Coffey: ‘I’ve turned every moment into an opportunity to be online, alert, working’

Did you return to work last week to an inbox full of unread emails that had accumulated over the Christmas break? Or did you, like me, check your emails every day over the holiday period, despite having your ‘out of office’ turned on? 

I told myself, if I just check in on my emails briefly every day or two, I’ll have a sense of what is awaiting me on my return to work. I’ll be on top of things. I’ll already know what emails need to be prioritised and what can wait, or be deleted. If there were things I could answer quickly or get off my plate, I did that, still careful not to spend more than a few minutes on my emails. I was, after all, on holidays. But I told myself I was doing this for me. The return to work would be easier this way. I didn’t dare admit to myself that by constantly checking in, even for a couple of minutes a day, I was never properly checking out.