[freejack]

I think this is misguided and would seem to reinforce bad practices, poor etiquette and bad culture.

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.

[Nursie]

>> 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.

>> 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.

[freejack]

No, we're on the same page. My point is that you should never receive most of those email in the first place. If they don't get sent (because there is a functional email culture in the workplace) then there's no need for dysfunctional policy to remedy the issue.

[endersshadow]

I think what many people fail to realize, in a corporate setting, is that email is asynchronous communication. Email is not chat, and we need to approach it differently. When I send an email, I expect an answer when you get time--if it's something I need within 24-48 hours, I will call, visit, or IM you if you're online.

[JoeAltmaier]

I'd go further. If its urgent, I'll chat or text. If its complex, I'll call.

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.

[freejack]

Totally! this is exactly right. I work with one small group of people that outside of our weekly status meeting, shares a ton of chatty one-liners via email several times a day. It drives me crazy that I can't get them to adopt Slack for these types of interactions but sometimes it is impossible to teach a dog new tricks ;-)

[scott_s]

In my experience, people understand that. What they are not good at, however, is having the perspective to know when asynchronous communication is more appropriate. (You have a question which requires a lot of explanation, and I'm doing you a favor by answering it? Email.)