Should holiday email be deleted?
bbc.co.uk
bbc.co.uk
Last year I emailed a car dealer who worked for Mercedes Benz USA, and I got an auto-reply from Daimler that my signature was unacceptable because the expiration date on my key was too far in the future, and they wouldn't deliver my message at all, unless I fixed it.
I know the salesperson had no idea what was going on with this - but as soon as a contacted him with a signed message and a shorter-term subkey I generated just for them, his outgoing messages started being signed too.
Then, a month ago, I got a notice from Daimler that my key was expiring and I needed to get a new one on file with them.
I've been signing emails as a policy for awhile, and it's the only experience of this sort I've had.
I can understand not reading it, and setting the expectation with your employer and coworkers that you're on vacation and you won't be reading emails. That's very reasonable.
But just deleting emails? That sounds kind of nuts. I handle my email when I get back. And I send emails to other people with the expectation that they'll handle theirs when they get back.
If I have a question for a coworker, I'll email it to them. I don't expect a response if they're on vacation. The question is now theirs to deal with, in due time. By auto-deleting it, it reverts to being my problem. I'm sending that email for the purpose of getting work done. In that sense, auto-deleting it is preventing me from doing my work. And then I just have to send it again once they're back.
Setting proper boundaries and expectations is the solution. If you're getting so much email that it's an insurmountable task once you get back from vacation, maybe your company needs to reexamine its email culture and practices.
Yes, it's still your problem when the other person is on vacation.
Think about it the other way, you go away for two weeks. You come back to hundreds of emails, many of which are questions. Most of the questions probably got answered by someone else, or are no longer relevant at all. If a question does still need answering, hell yes it's the asker's responsibility to communicate to you that it's still important.
That is just naive. Many problems can wait until the person gets back. Yeah, sure, if it's something that needs to be dealt with before the person gets back from vacation, it's my problem. Otherwise, it is NOT my problem.
And many have gone away when the person gets back, then the first thing the person has to do is trawl through a backlog and send out a bunch of "is this still needed?" emails. Putting the onus back on the person that needs it is a positive.
>> Yeah, sure, if it's something that needs to be dealt with before the person gets back from vacation, it's my problem. Otherwise, it is NOT my problem.
It's your problem because you need input from the other person, so it's your responsibility to chase it up no? Even with the backlog system there's a greater than average chance that your email will be missed in amongst noise.
Last time I worked a traditional job I would get back after a couple of weeks away to find hundreds of emails. Many were corporate spam, sure, but the majority of the rest were time-sensitive requests for my input which you may as well file straight to trash, if you can figure out which ones are now irrelevant.
Far better to have an auto-trasher and a notice to say 'ask me again in two weeks if this is important'
"Two weeks ago, you sent me an email, however my mail client automatically deleted it. If it is something I can still help you with, please reply back with the original email.
-- this is an automatically generated email --"
Here's the deal, and this is the point I think the (maybe unnecessarily heavy-handed) policy is meant to drive: You're not free to task your colleagues with work while they're away on holiday just be cause you can. If you rely on someone who's not there to get your job done then you can't do you job. That may or may be be your fault, but the organisation needs to be able to keep functioning while members are on holiday.
Sure, there exists cases where you only need a reply eventually, and only from that one exact individual, but in most cases, someone is actually covering and can handle the request as part of the normal workload, and in most of those cases, everybody is better off if you actually re-route the request to that person immediately.
And here's the bit I think is slightly heavy handed: Coming back from holidays, I like spending an afternoon skimming over emails for situational awareness. Deleting email would deprive me of the option to passively catch up rather than depending on having everything explained to me by colleagues. Skimming a few thousand emails is easy, making sure you've caught everything single thing you might be expected to respond to is stressful.
bad practices, i.e. if you want work life balance, don't check your email when you aren't in the office. Manage your co-workers expectations that you won't be replying when you aren't on the clock, don't work for a boss that has the expectation that you are functionally on-call at times when you should be with your family and friends.
bad etiquette, i.e. stop sending so much email yourself and stop responding to email that doesn't merit a response. OOO messages and other auto-responders are vile and just add to the mess - calendar requests, project updates, FYIs, CC"s, etc. Most of this messaging traffic is just unnecessary and only adds to the weight of one's inbox without making much of a contribution. Deal with your messaging in your app - turn off the notifications and update options and actually log into your calendar once or twice a day to view requests. Same goes for the rest of your web apps (I'm thinking of project and task tools like Asana, et al).
bad culture, i.e. be part of the solution, tell people when their email practices are dysfunctional. We have this thing at our office where staff will send out an email to 10 people asking "when is a good time to get together?" which triggers an avalanche of 25 messages all with conflicting instructions and requests about what might be the best time. I actively ask people to use my calendar and ignore the rest of the email on the subject. People are slowly starting to use my calendar for this sort of thing. Same goes for after-hours email. If you don't want people to think you'll respond after-hours, don't send email after hours! In the most extreme cases, if you can't change culture, then find a better place to work. Life is too short.
Corporate policy along the lines of "delete email while you are on vacation" just serve to reinforce all of these other bad practices. Email can be a force for good, you just have to use it that way.
I'd scatterplot all these forms of communication against latency and fidelity. Phone is lowest-latency and highest-fidelity (except for in-person of course). Email is high latency and high-fidelity. All the chat/text/twitter stuff is lower latency and spread across the fidelity spectrum.
They all have their place. I hate it when someone mis-uses them, for instance calling me and leaving a message. Phone is low-latency and high-fidelity; a voice message is the opposite corner (no ability to go back-and-forth; I won't see it for hours/days if at all). Voice mail is the worst possible fallback for a phone call.
>> Corporate policy along the lines of "delete email while you are on vacation"...
This doesn't seem to be anything to do with the article..?
It's not about whether or not you should check email outside of office hours (NO!) or keep your inbox empty, it's about auto-filing ALL email to the trash when on vacation. You know the situation - you come back from vacation to find several hundred emails in a backlog that you then have to sort through. Most are no longer relevant after a week or two away, and if they are important people can follow up now you're back.
However I do think there are perfectly legit emails, particularly in a large organisation, that have a very limited shelf-life and qualify for both should-be-sent and should-be-auto-trashed.
Examples - "Are you still heading up that project?" "Hey, I have this tech issue, can you help?". In both of these cases a quick reply would be useful, but in a week's time it's likely the issue has gone away or the person is now so stuck they'll remind you about it.
I guess you could argue that email is not the appropriate comms method for those questions...
I would like, at the very least, to see a federal law forbidding more than 40 hours max. The world has really deteriorated in regard to family life since the 80s. When everything started becoming 24-7, that's when the decline began. I remember the sanity of the 80s whilst living in a couple of countries in western Europe at the time. The pace of life was better, more family time, the fun challenge of getting a popular restaurant reservation before they closed at a sane hour. It wasn't all about profit then like it is now.
I make it clear to my current employer that I don't do nights and weekends. When I leave the office at 1700, I'm unemployed. My wife and children come first.
This seems like a nice sentiment but it comes across and being out of touch with the general public.
Many, people need to work more than 40 hours, pretty much anyone who works for an hourly wage that is around the minimum wage level, a week just to make ends meet. If your law is enacted you've just doomed a non negligible portion of the population to poverty.
How would you even enforce your no more than 40 hours a week? What about anyone with a small business, or a lawyer who can bill $400/hour, should he be told he can't make any more money this week?
We just ran a new gas line in our house, the plumber doing it was doing side jobs to save up for a Harley. Your law of not permitting anyone to work more than 40 hours a week seems to make the world a worse place than it is now:(
To clarify, the op said 40 hours should be the most anyone is allowed to work, no exceptions, I'm fine with a law that says no one can be force to work more than 40 hours. But limiting people to 40 hours just seems like a really bad law.
As to the email deletion, I like the idea but it seems like a nightmare from a compliance perspective:)
The biggest down side I can see is that most services only send out one out of office email. What if someone is gone for more than a few days. I"m likely to forget that they are out, or now I have to add everyone's holiday schedule and all correspondence I want them to know about, to the list of things I need to keep in my head so I can resend emails when they come back. I'm scared already:(
That said, isn't it a 40 hour max on contracted hours? Otherwise it is completely un-policeable. The idea is that you can't lose your job for refusing to work past 40 hours (i.e. refusing to take overtime). But you are allowed to work the overtime if you so please.
It is not legal to make you sign the opt out.
As a European what that says to me is that the minimum wage is too low and should be increased.
And equally there are people today who have to desperately hope that they get assigned enough hours this month to get out of poverty. Restrictions on maximum weekly working time would help those people.
> What about anyone with a small business
Less than 5 employees or a meaningful ownership stake and you're probably exempt, as with most of these kind of regulations.
> a lawyer who can bill $400/hour, should he be told he can't make any more money this week?
Uh, yes?
> To clarify, the op said 40 hours should be the most anyone is allowed to work, no exceptions, I'm fine with a law that says no one can be force to work more than 40 hours. But limiting people to 40 hours just seems like a really bad law.
Economic reality is that that distinction kind of disappears. If unpleasant practice X makes employers more money, and you can volunteer for unpleasant practice X, pretty soon the only way to get a job is if you "volunteer" for X, at least on the low end.
* I've been trained by my fascist, FOX news, libertarian upbringing that business comes first, even if it subjects 99.99% of the population to utter misery, sickness and death.
* I've been trained by my socialist, marxist, tree-hugger upbringing that people come first^H^H^H^H second (after seals and endangered fungi), even if everyone goes bankrupt and starves and our enemies overthrow and kill us.
Yeah, the "other guy's" values look pretty stupid, don't they? (pick which ever "other guy" suits your fancy)
Even if the other guy's values aren't a caricature, it's still hard to agree on what should be the outcome.
How much of that is due to both parents working, rather than the wife staying home and managing the family?
Then there coordination overhead in the family - even if the two parents work 20 hours each, it's unlikely that it's exactly divided so one is always home. Child care costs a lot of money. Eating out costs money.
But the most important reason: People still want careers and a career on half the working time takes in extremely simple terms at least twice as long.
Sometimes you have to sacrifice to make do for your family by moving, whatever. It's always better to sacrifice money than time from your children. As long as you are making it and saving a little and have a bit for holidays, nothing else really matters. Getting rich should never be the goal.
Your tone seems to me like you once wanted to be rich, but have since given up and are now trying to convince others that they should just give up too.
Your valuable time may be evenings and weekends with your family, mine may be being able to take a year out to travel or (although many European countries certainly don't seem to appreciate this), I may actually enjoy my job! In those instances, working a 70 hour work week may actually be what I want to do.
There's nothing stopping you having a corporate culture that encourages 40 hour working weeks, and if that's what works for you then by all means, find an employer who will respect that, but you can't expect everybody to be forced to follow that lifestyle, and you can't expect an employer not to take it into consideration when they decide who they want to hire.
Quoting PG on HN is perhaps a bit like preaching to the choir but this is very appropriate: http://www.paulgraham.com/wealth.html
True, but the assumption is false. As an industry we're terrible at measuring outputs, and sadly this causes management to fall back on measuring inputs.
And even that, you don't get a free choice of. Working 75% as long as the rest of your team doesn't get you 75% of the salary, it gets you fired.
So instead they get their bully friend to force others to comply with their wishes.
or risk being seen as working less hard as that person.
You missed a pretty important bit.
It solves a lot of problems in a single blow, and most problems people have with it can be answered by:
You shouldn't use your work email for that
or the opposite
You shouldn't use your personal email for that
That isn't something that falls under your "you shouldn't use your work email for that", and it may be an acceptable trade-off; but it is certainly something that could cause pain. Probably not as much pain as the number of emails you'd wade through anyway, but something to consider.
Also HR department invitations that do not have a secondary reminder, or take place while an employee is on vacation sound like the issue of the HR department not that employee in particular.
Being resolute about putting aside work and email while on vacation is a personal responsibility, not an email robot's function. Put up a reasonable out-of-office message and put down the technology if you're on vacation.
I get useful emails all the time (or at least, emails that I should see) and quite a few of these are from automated systems which don't give a damn whether I'm there or not. If a third-party support desk sends me an automated "Ticket Closed" email for a call I've had open for months then I need to be aware of that, and deleting the email doesn't really help anyone (except them maybe).
Holiday email within work environment where there is someone else covering for you suould all be deleted. In the case of Dailmer, the out of office clearly explains that the email is going to be deleted.
I had an old manager who didn't go quite so far as to delete it, but he didn't go through his backlog after a vacation because "if it's important they'll ask again". I quite agree with this.
I just go through and flag actionable items, instead of trying to answer anything right away. I start with the newest messages first, so I can ignore the thread of messages that lead up to the latest.
I've never spent more than an hour narrowing hundreds of emails down to a few that still require my attention. A small price to pay to keep things from falling through the cracks, because guess who is going to get blamed when someone forgets to resend an important message to me?
If I need a response within a short timeframe, I'd email the details AND use a synchronse communications platform, like a telephone.
Use the right tool for the job, whats next the post office offering out of house replies to people that post something to you?
The logic is simple though: If your email is really important then it's important enough to resend.
FxxK YEAH!!!
Give the surplus email the "FAX machine" treatment! ("Office Space" reference)
Also what kind of holes does it create in email threads for conversations that happen before and after the vacation?
While I was out of the office, she panicked and decided she needed us to complete her request immediately. If she had updated her original ticket, or opened a new one, it would have been sent to whoever was covering my work while I was out of town. She also didn't bother trying to call our office, which would have resulted in the same thing. Instead she decided her best bet was to email me directly, not once, not twice, but three times, and apparently was blind to my out of office replies all three times.
She finally called our office and yelled at one of the other people here because I wasn't replying to her emails. My coworker told her I was out of town, and she insisted she never received my out of office replies. My coworker ended up sending me test emails from both internal and external email addresses to verify my account was sending the out of office replies, which it was.