How would you like to return from vacation to an empty mailbox at work?
It sometimes takes me an entire week after my return to go through all my accumulated email messages — and by about noon the first day back, the vacation glow is definitely gone.
The August issue of GovExec magazine (www.govexec.com) reported that German employers force their employees to enjoy vacation by deleting their email and returning it to the sender (please click “continue to magazine” in the upper right corner).
It might be nice for the employees’ peace of mind (very nice), but it then it puts the burden on the sender to remember to resend the message after the person returns (or cut the person out of the info loop). To my knowledge, Outlook doesn’t have an automated feature to hold an email and send it on a particular date, so you’d have to store the email as a draft and write yourself a pop-up reminder to resend it on a date after the employee returns. (Or, you could simply delete the message and forget about the whole thing.)
What do you think of the “forced vacation”idea?
I prefer to put an Out of Office message on. When I return to work I have a process. Delete all newsletters. Filter those emails that I am cc’d to and leave those to last. Tackle the ones directly sent to me.