#Microblog Monday 201: Freedom
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A professor set up his out-of-work message with a caveat. Any emails sent between the dates he was gone would be deleted by the server. The sender received a message instructing them to re-send the email again after an assigned date. In other words, the professor returned to inbox zero, the same way they left for their vacation, and the burden to resend was on the sender. He reasoned that if it was an important message, the person would resend. And if they didn’t, he had to accept that fact in order to avoid being buried under email when he returned to work.
I kind of love this and I kind of hate it at the same time. I think it’s brilliant AND it would depend on the person whether I resent the message. I would really really really need to get the message through to play along.
What would you do?
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13 comments
I’m glad I’m first today, as after 200 Microblog Mondays and 600 Roundups, my post today was about you!
I do like this idea. There’s no point in taking leave if you don’t give your mind a break, and it’s not fair to the people you’re with if you don’t give them your time and attention. It would just take self-discipline to set up, and to rely on it working.
My first thought was that this HAD to be a tenured full professor who is male, cis and white, probably at a research intensive doctoral granting institution… almost everyone else would be dealing with too much imposter syndrome and other external expectations to possibly get away with that.
I have never had a job that would have permitted me to do this. In fact, in my current position (and most others in my industry), the expectation would be that one would respond to emails, even if only briefly, even while on vacation unless one truly had ZERO access (like out in the wilderness or on a cruise ship). This expectation that we will be available nearly all the time is one of the reasons that my employer pays for/subsidizes smart phone for its employees.
I wouldn’t have been allowed to do this–but I love it.
That seems unlikely to work for most people and actually is kind of rude. In my work I interact with a lot of outside agencies and there’s a lot of email traffic among groups with emails routinely sent to a group of people. It’s not reasonable to expect the sender to resend to just one person (and also to expect that person to remember—amongst all the groups/topics/etc for which they send emails that a certain email or two need to be resent). Usually people on vacation, if they’re going to be of reach, will say so in their out of office message. That’s enough. Also, sometimes whatever you’re emailing needs to get out of your brain while it’s fresh in your memory. So this guy expects people to save a draft somewhere and then mark their calendar to send it when he gets back. Not realistic.
I also see this as rude. It seems imply that the person on leave has more important needs that the people sending them mail. Just because someone goes out, doesn’t mean the work goes away or the world stops. This approach forces the person sending the message to do double work – send the note, read the OOO message, schedule a calendar reminder to re-send the note upon return, then actually re-send it. That seems selfish.
I always found going through my emails & voice mails was a good way to ease back into work after returning from vacation. (That said, I never had to deal with the volumes that some of the higher-ups did.)
One of the things I loathed while teaching was having students email over a break and never follow up, assuming that that burden was on me. It meant I never got a vacation as I was always checking email. I love this idea if it works!!!
I love this, and I think it should become accepted practice for anyone taking earned vacation time or unpaid time-off.
It’s a boundary issue. If you have a problem you’re coming to me with, it’s your problem until I am available to help you with it. On a vacation I have earned, I am not available to you. But after it, I am. So bring it to my attention then.
The burden stays were it belongs.
As a professor, I think this is brilliant. In fact, I’m copying it and will use it NOW. Typically, (almost) every email I receive during breaks comes from students trying to persuade me to “give” them a higher grade. The people who NEED to reach me know how to reach me.
This professor has got to be super committed to the zero inbox thing. Because I think that I would be real tempted to not email again if I received a message that said, “your message has been deleted! Please try again on x date when I’m back from vacation.” Maybe if what it did was tell me the person was on vacation and then said it would put the email through in a delayed fashion it would feel less awful. It’s the delete part that bothers me, although I have to guess that your original sent mail would still be there so you could send it later as it was? I feel like an out of office reply is TOTALLY appropriate, even one that says you absolutely will not be checking email and you truly mean it, with an alternate person to contact in case of dire emergency. But to turn your inbox into a black hole because you don’t want to have anything in your inbox to return to? That’s weird. It puts me off. Of course I have several thousand emails in my inbox, so I don’t get the pull of the zero inbox that clearly is behind this policy! 🙂
*phew*, made it onto the list!
I love the idea, but I’ve started setting boundaries at work as I’ve reached burn-out and I need to figure out how to make this position work for me. After all, it only gets worse as I advance in the organization.
I wouldn’t be able to get away with what he did, and I totally agree with Lindz, he’s in a position of privilege to be able to do it and get away with it. My solution is to skim emails and slowly chip away at the inbox. It’s not unusual for me to have at least 50 unread messages on any given day and coming back from vacation will see close to 200 in my inbox. Now, if we all agreed to do it, it’d be different!
I’m not a fan of putting the onus on the sender to re-send. An out of office notice is fun, but to tell me my email will be deleted . . . no bueno