Google(s goog) Distinguished Engineer Matt Cutts says he's going offline for a few months. Cutts, who head's Google's webspam team and helped drive the rollout of the controversial recent Panda 4.0 search algorithm update, is going to shut down, tune out, maybe do a little ballroom dancing and otherwise stay away from work until (probably) October. And to that, we should all say mazel tov.
Cutts unveiled his plan on his blog on Thursday.
One critical point is that I won't be checking my work email at all while I'm on leave. My friend and colleague Amit Singhal took about six weeks off not too long ago, and his #1 piece of advice was to unplug from work email. So that's what I'm going to do. I will set up Gmail filters to forward some of my outside email to a small set of webspam folks, but they won't be replying to emails.
Hooray for that sentiment. People who never unplug are less productive, less creative and less healthy than those who do. And I say that having just come off from a full week off during which the only computing I did was a little lackadaisical online Scrabble.
Even workaholic Arianna Huffington has made taking downtime a focus of her latest book and her Unplugging Challenge. (Does anyone else have trouble believing she doesn't check email on weekends? Yeah me too.)
Feature photo courtesy of Shutterstock user Ditty_about_summer