Set Connect up before you go away
Two decisions do most of the work: whether each channel keeps sending without you, and who reads the queue while you are gone. Everything else follows — hours, escalation, the commitments already dated inside your absence, and a written note so the person covering knows what is normal and what is not.
Decide the autonomy question honestly#
There are two failure modes and they are not symmetrical. Leaving a channel on ask_before_send with nobody to approve produces a queue of finished replies that never go out, and from the customer's side that is not a slow reply — it is no reply. Raising a channel to autonomous without preparing the ground produces sends nobody reviewed. Pick per channel, not for everything at once.
| Situation | Reasonable choice |
|---|---|
| Somebody is covering and will read the queue daily | Leave the modes as they are |
| Nobody is covering; the channel handles routine enquiries | Autonomous, with narrower rules for the accounts that matter |
| Nobody is covering; the channel handles commercial negotiation | ask_before_send, and tell customers you are away |
| A channel you would rather pause entirely | off — nothing is drafted and nothing is queued |
| One customer who must never get an unreviewed reply | A contact-scope rule, which beats whatever the channel is set to |
The rest of the setup#
Set business hours to what will really be true, including the phone lines.
Result Out-of-hours calls get the after-hours behaviour instead of being answered as though somebody were about to pick up.
Write a standing instruction covering the absence: what to say about timescales, what to escalate immediately, what not to commit to.
Result A standing instruction is durable direction rather than a note on one thread, so it applies across channels and conversations you have not seen yet.
Walk the follow-up list for anything dated inside your absence.
Result These will fire whether or not anybody is watching. Reschedule the ones that need you, and make sure the rest are on a channel that can carry them.
Move anything that genuinely needs a person onto the
taskchannel, named for whoever is covering.Result No drain will ever send a task, so it waits for a human instead of quietly turning into an automated message.
Tell the person covering what the queue is, where it is, and what normal looks like.
Result Needs You is ranked rather than chronological and drains by itself as causes clear — somebody who does not know that will work it top-to-bottom and panic at the depth.
Brief the person covering#
- Entries in the queue clear themselves when their cause clears — a line health warning disappears when the line recovers, without anybody doing anything.
- A held reply is no reply from the customer's side, so age in the queue is the number to watch, not depth.
- Refusals are decisions and are recorded. A commercial question Connect would not answer is escalated on purpose rather than dropped.
- The allowance can run out. When it does, work is held rather than lost and the mail read cursor deliberately does not advance, so nothing goes missing.
- If something looks wrong, the Decision Log answers what happened and under which rule before anybody needs to call you.
Coming back#
- Read the Decision Log for the period rather than the inbox. It shows what was decided and what was refused, which the inbox does not.
- Check the follow-up summary for overdue items that accumulated, and the reasons attached to them.
- Read the call reviews from the period as a set, not one by one — the same finding across many calls is a setting, one finding on one call is noise.
- Put the autonomy modes back where you want them, and remove the temporary standing instruction rather than leaving it to age.
Questions#
Should I just turn Connect off while I am away?
Rarely. Switching off stops the loop thinking, so nothing is drafted at all — mail still arrives and records still update, but the work waits for your return in full. Turning one channel off is usually the more proportionate move.
What happens to a phone follow-up dated while I am away?
It drains like any other, through the same gates as any outbound call. If the line is not ready it is retried in an hour, and a row more than a day late is closed as missed rather than rung — a very late call-back is worse than none.
Can I have replies drafted but not sent, and read them when I get back?
Yes, that is draft_only: it prepares and stops, without asking anybody. It is the right choice when you want to see what Connect would have said but not to burden a colleague with approving it.