[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.

[Nursie]

Fair enough, and yes there is a lot of unnecessary email sent.

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...