This sounds like me. I am rarely “off” because my hours are very flexible. I have work that needs to be done and its left up to me to get it done by a specific deadline.
Sounds weird to people because I can be working at say 11pm on a Friday, or 2pm on a Saturday just analysing some runs that have just been completed.
Hours work out in the end (week-wise) but its pretty up and down.
I used to let people contact me on vacation if something urgent came up but my wife got annoyed one time a major issue came up and I had to work like 50% of that vacation solving it. Now I just put a full block on my time (this has now become a directive from HR to everybody as people were starting to burn out and they insisted on people taking real time off. They track this via employee surveys)
Except in crunch time, I tend to work 2-4 hours in the morning, and another 2-4 hours at night, 6-7 days a week. Some weeks it’s fewer hours, and some weeks, it’s a longer slog.
It’s worked well for me for a while, but it really became smooth when I started mostly working with folks outside North America. Time zones end up not being that big a deal for me.
I’m glad company policy tolerates this, and I’m thankful to have an interesting role where this makes sense, given everything else that goes on with me and mine.
If you file your emails into folders the folders have a 2 year retention limit. If you need to hold on to something longer than that, you need to copy it out of the mail system. But I am horrible at filing and orginizing so I simply have a backup inbox and sent box and every 90 days I copy everything from my inbox and sent box into those. Then after 2 years it goes away.
I used to have a steel trap memory and could find things on my very messy desk (before email) then in my email box. Once in about 2012, I dug up an email from a consulting actuary, that I had received in 1995 a few months after I had started my job. Finding things within the last 5 years was a regular thing until they deleted all my emails.
This code, placed in ThisOutlookSession, is a way to automate running a macro roughly once a day (specifically at the arrival of the first message at least 24 hours after the code last ran):
Private Sub Application_NewMail()
Dim sLastRun As String
sLastRun = Format(Now, "ddddd")
If GetSetting("MyAppName", "Settings", "LastRun", "") = sLastRun Then
Exit Sub
End If
ArchiveMessages
SaveSetting "MyAppName", "Settings", "LastRun", sLastRun
End Sub
The macro “ArchiveMessages”, stored in a regular module, might look something like this:
Public Sub ArchiveMessages()
Set fldrInbox = Application.Session.GetDefaultFolder(olFolderInbox)
Set fldrSent = Application.Session.GetDefaultFolder(olFolderSentMail)
Set fldrArchiveIn = GetFolder("userid@domain\path\to\archive\in\folder")
Set fldrArchiveSent = GetFolder("userid@domain\path\to\archive\sent\folder")
Dim Item As Object
dtTwoWeeksAgo = DateAdd("d", -14, Now())
For i = fldrInbox.Items.Count To 1 Step -1
Set Item = fldrInbox.Items.Item(i)
If (Item.ReceivedTime < dtTwoWeeksAgo) And (Not Item.UnRead) Then
Item.Move fldrArchiveIn
End If
Next i
For i = fldrSent.Items.Count To 1 Step -1
Set Item = fldrSent.Items.Item(i)
Item.Move fldrArchiveSent
Next i
Set Item = Nothing
Set fldrInbox = Nothing
Set fldrSent = Nothing
Set fldrArchiveIn = Nothing
Set fldrArchiveSent = Nothing
End Sub
Caution: I edited those macros to remove incriminating/identifying stuff. No guarantees that I didn’t botch something up in the process.
Caution2: New Outlook doesn’t have VBA. At some point, Classic Outlook will go away. Considering just how much I use Outlook’s implementation of VBA to make my life easier, I will be very sad when that happens.
