Deleting emails on vacation. Not that simple, isn’t it?
Spending last few days travelling I got into thinking about article I read week or two before about companies more and more deleting people’s emails when they are on vacation. I think it’s a great idea. But it’s not black and white as it looks like.
Because I’m a freelancer I don’t have strict separation of work email and personal email my usage might be a little out of sync with world in companies, but I still think it’s an interesting challenge in general.
How for instance the “logging” emails will be handled? For example every transaction on my bank account ultimately generates email with some information. So I know what I’ve paid (or what invoice was paid), how much money is left on my account and so on. Similar to some notifications from services – database backup was corrupted, I reached some point on my cloud services, bug report was created, …, you get the idea. If you simply delete all emails and send notification to sender – which is often useless on these emails – how are you going to know what happened?
You might argue that email is not dashboard or status report. I agree. But it’s so easy to just send an email when something goes wrong instead of creating whole status pages or integrating with 3rd party services.
I’d like to be without some emails on my vacation. No question. I just don’t think it’s that easy. Email today is more than just a tool for exchanging letters.
Self-discipline is also interesting idea, isn’t it? Just don’t open the email you don’t have to read while you’re on vacation. It’s not that urgent. Something I learned over the years. It might be challenging because you often cannot get the emails out of you eyes completely. But. If it’s really urgent they will call you or text you or send you another email (very likely you’ll be back from vacation at that time).
I’d like to hear your solutions to getting rid of email on vacation.
