The next time you’re on holiday, you’ll probably set up an out of office reply. When you get back to work, you’ll face a mountain of emails to deal with. One company is allowing employees to delete messages when they go on holiday — which isn’t a bad idea.
Photo by Mike Towber
The New York Times reports on car manufacturer Dailmer’s “Mail On Holiday” option:
The program, called Mail on Holiday, politely informs senders that their messages were instantly deleted, but they can contact a designated alternate worker if necessary. The email blackout is optional for the company’s 100,000 workers, but “the response is basically 99 per cent positive,” a Daimler spokesman, Oliver Wihofszki, told BBC Radio. “Everybody says, ‘That’s a real nice thing.’ ”
We’ve covered how to write an effective out-of-office reply and to make sure you get coworkers’ permission before naming them in the reply. If that isn’t working and people are still emailing you while you are on vacation, you could create your own “Mail on Holiday” . You could set up a filter to send all those messages to the trash after your out-of-office message — just make sure you warn the sender in your auto-reply.
A safer alternative might be to tell the reader you won’t make reading their email a priority. and filter the emails to a special folder.
Giving Email a Holiday [The New York Times]
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