On average women in my work take 9-12 months mat leave, and the company shuts down your email when you are away. That way you come back to an empty inbox.
Whenever I go on 2-3 week holidays I always say I will just delete my inbox, but then never have the balls to do it haha
It gives you the out and precedent. I would still archive the emails, because thats how I am. But your message isn't wrong. It means that people shouldn't expect a response to emails sent during your absence, and removes any pressure from you that you had to respond. If it's important, contact you when you're back.
My company locks us out when on leave like that. I like it because I could ignore the inbox when I got back from paternity leave. The company does it as a CYA. They don't want anything weird with an FMLA claim if someone says "welllll... Technically I was doing emails that week" or something like that
Oh of course we set an OOO message. That's how we can ignore stuff when we come back. Great team I work with. If they didn't care, the whole thing collapses
Just set up an out of office response that tells the sender that you are away and the email has been deleted, that they can send it to you again on x date.
Because the previous commenter was clearly talking about being gone on one trip for 2-3 weeks (pretty uncommon in the US) but you seem to be talking about taking a total of 21 vacation days over the course of the year (which is incredibly common in the US, at least for people with salaried jobs).
To be fair when you next have a couple weeks off and hesitate deleting those emails think on what i was taught on a management course.
"Delete everything over 3 days old, if it was important or requires attention they will send a follow up just as you would if you hadn't had a response."
My boss went on her first real vacation in years - was gone for 2 weeks. Her out of office said "if this is urgent contact [me], if not email me on x date when im back.
I have PTO scheduled for the week of Christmas. I intend on forgetting I existed at work for 8 days. Why? Because Vince did it to me all summer when I covered for him while he was sneaking off to Seattle under Sean's nose every other week.
Fair enough. Sean, though, needs to be more aware — and Vince needs to stop taking advantage of the situation. Don’t put up with the BS Josh my man, you’re above having to deal with their fuckassery. That said, enjoy your Christmas break big dog!!
I think the one thing that's really fucked up about it the most is Sean is our Regional District Ops Manager. The company I work for had to part ways with the Local Operations Manager leaving a big leadership gap at that level and Vince and I were needed. But dude decided he finally wanted a love life which ended up backfiring on him. Even knocked this chick up and stressed her out to the point of miscarriage. He's been a shit head and continues to be a shit head with the new Ops manager.
Sounds like an opportunity for you to get a leg up in the company is brewing. Let him be a shit head and expose his lack of value while you continue to show your worth and maybe you’ll be telling Vince what to do soon enough.
At any rate, sorry you’ve gotta put up with the nonsense brother. Hopefully it sorts itself out before too long. Peace and grease my dude ✌️
What a different world they live in lol. I had a boss once ask me what I thought about two comparative Mercedes that were both $140k plus cars. I told him I’ve never driven anything close to that because I made 36k before taxes lmao
An ex boss I had told me a story of how she and her boyfriend were looking at yachts and were shown a set of yachts $15-$20k less than their estimated budget and she was surprised at how they were still good quality compared to the more expensive ones. I was making $13 an hour.
I had a boss ask me something about a ski boat, to be fair I had talked about waterskiing a lot that summer, and what he should get. He was looking at a $150k boat (in 1998 lol). I had a 14ft welded aluminum. The tire and rim package he was looking at for the trailer cost more than my trailer lol
My boat was set up for fishing on the west coast of Canada (between Vancouver Island and the mainland) so I used to help feed myself, and used it year-round between the fishing, waterskiing and going camping in remote areas. He wanted a ski boat for 3 months of summer lol
U americans just need to be a bit more chilled about work. Who the fuck cares whats going on at work while being on pto?! I wouldnt even care if the whole place burns to the groud.
We aren’t “chill” about work because we have no rights. Europeans would be having heart attacks at 47 too if your child’s diabetes medication was totally dependent on your job which is controlled by some asshole middle managers interpretation of you
Therein lies your problem: The USA is the land of the middleman. ‘Health insurance’ is the biggest scam of all time. It’s like forcing the citizens of Bikini Bottom to buy flood insurance.
Please give me a rundown on how you would outfit yourself to go take on the government. When the knife/hellfire missile comes your way, what system you go for response? Green tip in a PMag and a $900 optic? Good luck lol
He’s making fun of the fact that a lot of Americans defend the 2nd amendment simply because they want to have guns, and not because of the ostensible reason that those rights exist (to use guns to fight back against the government), which as you pointed out would be absurd nowadays.
Nah it's a culture thing. A few Americans I've met have clearly made their career their whole identity and can't understand why everyone else doesn't do the same. There's a difference between caring about your employer and caring about being employed. Nobody wants to be fired, you guys aren't unique.
Any manager I've had has always been a human first, worker drone second. They don't hear from me when I'm off because they don't want to hear from me when they're off.
Also "Europeans" is referencing half a billion people. We don't all live the same way.
Nah Europeans are one homogeneous group of techno listening tight pants. I’ve met some Europeans and the few limited experiences I’ve had with them reinforces my belief system so I have it all figured out.
I’m sorry to tell you but you don’t know fucking shit about living in our shithole country. The few Americans you’ve met probably also visited whatever place you’re from which means the have the money to travel. Congrats at meeting the most privileged in our society and basing your judgements
I came to say this. I work for a French company and my favourite this is everyone disappears for August. It’s like the world stops, everyone chills out and spends a month with their family.
Was he in leave? Cause if so good for him. And you. You’re on leave. If someone contacts you from work for any reason except to go for a pint. The only response is somewhere between ‘I will find out when I get back’ to ‘go fuck yourself, I’m on holiday’ depending on how much you like them.
We have a system where each parent gets 160 days which can be used anytime during the first 2 years of your kids life. If the kid is premature you both get extra time off and the 160 days each start from the assumed due date.
I'm not trying to start anything out have a go at anyone but let's remember that parenting leave isn't vacation. Some people find it more enjoyable than their jobs but a lot don't and either way it is demanding and exhausting.
Yea that’s not gonna work if you are supposed to be responsible for anything with long term impact. At the very least you need to know the current status of your projects etc. maybe if you are an individual contributor you can treat it like you started a new job.
I love this for her. But I do not have the type of job where I can just say ah fuck whatever happened during those months. I may need that info later or reference it. This sounds like someone who is just focused on daily tasks rather than long-term projects.
Maybe he archives them, not sure. But our work emails get autodeleted after a few years. A very large percentage is also just automated notifications about stuff that happens elsewhere, such as comments on a ticket system that you can just find there if you still need it
I also don't delete emails on my personal account unless it's spam
Not every email warrants a response. I still archive those work emails for reference later. My paper trail is eternal! On X day at 3:33 PM you stated...
Maternity leave is 12 months in most places (not the US). No fucking way is anyone going through a year of emails that aren't even relevant anymore. The out of office should have pointed them to someone who could help in your absence anyway.
This - only delete them all if you have said you will in an autoreply. Otherwise some of those people will be thinking, "she'll reply once she has got through her email backlig on her return," and some of those will be opportunities for you, not the sender.
We are actually expected by management to do so for absence of two weeks or more. Alternatively it's fine to ask IT to deactivate the account for that timespan
I totally understand the sentiment, but if this is your approach to email, you cannot also be the person who complains about meetings that could have been an email.
This is the most frustrating colleague to work with, because whatever the mode of communication- they somehow always find a way to absolve themselves of engagement in any process and make it someone else’s problem.
Part of my job is to get people together to engage in a collective decision making process before a deadline where I have to deliver the outcome. Once the outcome has been delivered, you suddenly get loads of ‘helpful’ feedback on things that now cannot be changed… and the cycle continues.
I'm on month 10 of maternity leave. Going back in 2. Are you proposing that I read through every email? Or the person who I trained to cover me, and gave access to my email gives me a thorough handover?
Yeah it's insane lmao, several months of emails to wade through after mat leave?? Who the hell is reading all of that?! Even the most recent threads will require context!
There's a big difference between extended leave and what the poster was talking about organizing decisions. If youre gone for an extended period, not your problem. If you're ignoring company/planning related communications while working, is a completely different issue
They brought a completely different scenario from what OP has shown and got mad about it.
Obviously anyone who's a blatantly bad coworker would be horrible to work with - no one would argue with this. Water is wet, the sky is blue etc., these are well known and this too seems unnecessary to mention.
I don't understand where the need is to bring that up alongside a post about someone returning from maternity leave, it's clearly a very different scenario but folks who do take mat leave are already given enough flack for taking 'an extended vacation' (eyeroll) and women face enough discrimination in the workplace without needing to add any more negativity to maternity leave, I don't think there was any need to then bring up generally bad coworkers.
It may seem like a little thing but it really isn't.
It's a Contrarian thing and they just like to argue/rant, I have a friend who insists on every conversation turning into a hypothetical I never mentioned, as if it's some Gotcha when in reality it has no relation to what we're talking about.
And this isn't said as some dig against them or my friend, we all do it too just to a lesser or greater degree. Some people are just really bad about it.
At my last place there were easily 300 emails per day, all trouble tickets and bullshit mixed in.
So after just a few weeks it would be overflowing with 10s of thousands of emails to sort through, best to just delete all that shit. If I'm needed for any of that when I get back it can be forwarded to me ..
VS now at my current job, there's maybe 5 to 10 emails per week, most of it reminders, less of it is just anniversary/birthday shoutouts
Where do you work that you actually expect a thorough hand over? They will give you the highlights, if you want more understanding you probably will need to filter through some of the emails and ask follow up questions.
It took me four hours to delete the emails when I got back. And it was only external. Id delete and the server would send more. Rinse and repeat for hours. And I had to delete them to be able to send an email. I was gone for 13 months.
I've been on parental leave for 18 months plus 4 months of vacation I saved up. Why would someone emailing me over a year ago be read? It's no longer important.
I have two thoughts on that.
1. If someone is on leave you should consider they don't exist during leave. If someone is that important to a decision there should be more than one person that can make that decision.
2. Many times when people aren't providing feedback at the appropriate times it's a process or organizational issue. They could be providing the feedback to their direct managers. They could only be brought into the project piecemeal and only see the full picture after the change. They could be under empowered in their role (multiple rounds of taking on the responsibilities of former employees without an official job change). It could be a lot of things.
I say this as someone that goes through this a lot at work and sees both sides. If it's a continual problem across multiple employees chalking it up to a problem with how they work is more or less you doing the same thing. Talk to your leadership about what can be done to fix your company's inherent problems.
If you constantly gather people together for decisions and don't get feedback until afterwards then what does that tell you? You need to change your approach to get the best out of the team.
I was gone for 5 working days and I ended up with around 587 mails when I came back. Around 10% were status updates from Jira and another 10% HR stuff - birthdays, his story, her story, we are a family and all…but rest were genuine work mails! Took me a week to get through them.
don’t delete them, you might need to reference that info. mark everything as “read” and anything that’s actually important or needs follow up - they’ll send you another email that you can respond to.
The redditors celebrating this are the same people who complain about not getting promoted because they don't socialize enough at work. The average redditor has a woefully unimportant entry level job and puts in as little effort as humanly possible.
In an Aussie, out working conditions are quite good, and I still think this is stupid, and demonstrates a general lack of forethought at best, and an absolute disregard for the people around you at worst.
Icelandic here, and the best advice a executive at a company I worked for gave me is to not chase missed phone calls or old emails, if it was important they will call/e-mail again, lowers the stress a lot when you are swamped at work. We also just got informed of anything important when we got back from vacation, no need to check any messages received while we were away, not even if we were just sick for a day.
That is very different from outright deleting them. If something is needed later, someone might tell you to reference the email sent on x date as happens in any business or even personal communication. The OP post is probably made up or if real the person is just plain stupid and perhaps added work for the IT department because they will now need to undelete her emails if something comes up.
I'm definitely not recommending that they should read through an entire years worth of archival emails, but like what's wrong with just marking as read?
Put em in a folder if you need your inbox to be clear, but immediately making a hard commitment to just be totally out of the loop and with no way to get yourself any part of the way back in is crazy to me.
Some asshole is on annual leave and has put you as their OOO (5 emails)
etc.
I will occasionally just highlight the 300+ unread emails and just mark them as read and get on with my day. If I'm needed, they'll get in touch directly.
Not the person you're asking, but in my case I need to take action on a small fraction of the emails coming into my inbox.
Why do I get so much "junk"?
I own a lot of customer facing email groups, and actively monitor them to make sure things are being picked up correctly, and jumping in when I need to. I also get copied into a lot of emails directly.
There are also a lot of corporate emails that are kind of spam. I get something like 200-300 emails most days, and only about half of those are in English.
I've had this several time in germany, just get the auto answer: person XY isnt available at the moment, this email will not get redirected to his/her substitute.
Had a colleague return from sick leave after a burn out. Asked him how he would start up and he told me heb was planning on working through his e-mail.
Told him to select all and dump it straight into the bin. Noone in a company is irreplaceable. The company moves on when you are away. Sp anything older than 2 weeks is already forgotten.
My boss currently has 34k unread emails in his inbox. When I told him that would give me intense anxiety he replied with “I get paid to execute a scope of work, answering every email I receive is not part of that scope of work.” Yes, my boss is pretty cool.
When I was an operations manager, I went on vacation across the world with my family. I can't remember my exact wording because it was 10 years ago, but my put of office message was basically "I am on vacation with no access to work emails. I return on XX date. Upon my return, I will be marking all unread emails as read. If you still require my attention by the time I've returned from vacation, please send me an email Monday morning. "
It was the best decision I ever made. I do that every time now.
Absolute madlad way to deal with email anxiety. Can we all just take a moment to appreciate how powerful the 'If they really need to talk to me, they'll find me' mindset is?
I actually did this as well. I didn’t delete them, I just unhighlighted everything and paid attention to just team meetings and chats. It’s incredibly liberating
This is the way. Im a level 3 at a NOC. I take on average 50 calls a day and 75 emails a day. 12 hr shift. Coming back from a week off can have 400 emails. I right click, mark all as read. It’s not logistically possible to read all that. Been at my company 8 years.
I just move them into a folder and pretend I'm going to look at them.
But seriously, as a manager there is nothing more frustrating than the person who returns from leave and a week later they are still going through their emails.
Sorry. I wasn't clear - my bad! I meant people who don't do any other work other than read emails forever.
I always prepare a return document for all of my team - every change, things to be aware of etc and I attach any important emails that actually need to be read.
But some staff insist on reading everything (including all the 'jokey' emails) before they do anything else. Really annoying if someone has been gone for 12 months or more.
They're on leave, given that they take precautions like having an automated reply on their email and having coverage then it's perfectly reasonable if they "miss" something.
Hell, you're the manager, you should make damn sure that their work is accounted for and taken care of when they're on leave.
I feel like I am dying alittle reading most of these comments. Maybe it’s just my job but I can’t imagine how many important files, comments, threads and wha could be vital history got deleted in snap of a finger and how many Redditors seems to agree with this.
Deleting the threads on who did what and why they did it…. How many project files are deleted that could have been sent from a third party or vendor. I am sickened
Doesn’t really work if one of the emails is sent from Spain, another one from Malaysia and the third one from Colombia and your workplace is in neither of these countries.
But that’s often how I deal with ours at work. If I reacted to every email I received then I would get nothing looked at or done. Learning to ignore most things is a powerful tool. Knowing or having a spidey sense into what is important is necessary.
if im not in "the office" I don't exist. i'm paid only for very specific hours, thus the only emails i ever respond to when not on the clock, are emails about when i will next be on site. i'm not salaried. i'm hourly; we only need agree on what hours i am i working, and i will work those hours and respond to business within those hours
No shame in declaring email bankruptcy. Just email top ten senders to tell them that you declare email bankruptcy and then select all and delete. Cleaner slate and it comes off your email credit report in 7 to 10 years.
Which is why i only give my phone number to my direct supervisor in case i cant come in unexpectedly, that fucker gets blocked as soon as i get on pto lol
My boss took a sabbatical of a few weeks, coupled with some saved up PTO. When he got back, I asked him about his inbox. He said "I just deleted everything older than two weeks. If they really need me, they'll message me again."
I live by that core idea. Nothing's important until it is. (at work)
My father was president of a financial institution and would clear his inbox at the end of every day. He said “for anything urgent they’ll call and if it was important they’ll send it again.” Held the job for nine years (nearly tripling assets) until voluntary retirement.
I made a subfolder in outlook called !irrelevant and made many rules that moved mails to there. Once or twice I missed free chocolate handouts but nothing major.
When I started work as a claims agent for an e-commerce company, the very first thing that happened was that a freight provider lost 8000 packages. This took about a week to be noticed and the email was just flooded with messages from customers wondering where their chinese crap was and the support crew just couldn't reply to them all. When it was found out that the freight provider had basically just fucked the company over and ran with the money the CEO decided to send out new packages to all these customers via the regular freight service procifer and 4000 email messages was just deleted. What was in those messages? Nobody knows.
Also, a month and a half later a postal courier rolls of eight wagons of packages that has now been returned and guess who has to go over each fucking one on top of his regular workload?
Email is mostly garbage and should be handled accordingly. Only useful as a CYA if you're accused of dropping the ball, otherwise there are like 5 better ways to communicate, with face-to-face in 1st place.
I barely respond to emails anyway. Most of it is redundant shit someone already told me in person and if it’s really that important they can pick up the phone that resides not two feet away from them and call me.
I actually put in my out of office message that I will be deleting all my email upon return and if they need something to contact me directly when I get back.
Back when I had a job, I would be gone for a couple days and the sky was falling. I would return to work with emails demanding to know why I hadn’t responded.
The automatic reply was always set to “I am OOO without access to email and I’ll address issues upon my return.” However that statement wasn’t obvious enough for some people.
I’m a big proponent in not doing anything work related on the weekend or while out on PTO.
I once worked with a manager who said when his inbox got out of hand, he’d deal with a third, delete a third and ignore a third. I asked him how he knew which ones were ‘safe’ to delete/ignore and he just shrugged.
Anytime I'm out of the office I delete my emails when I return. If the sender is too stupid or too arrogant to read my out of office message then they can resend it on their time.
If it was important they'll reach back out. Easy way to filter out what was actually important.
Edit: my ooo says basically I won't be reading email while I'm out and to contact me on "X" return date.
A colleague of mine leaves an out of office saying she won’t read any emails received while on leave, and to resend your email after she’s back, if you want a reply. It’s pretty effective actually.
Napoleon used to wait 3 weeks to open letters after he got them. The issues that were not important would get solved in that time and the important stuff was still pending and he’d take care of it after reading the letters.
When I was on leave I would always set a rule for all emails to go into a folder and of course I had an auto reply.
That way when I came back I didn’t feel overwhelmed by my inbox But I could also go through the folder of emails to see if there was anything really important that I missed.
I’m an admin for the Emr at a hospital, and get hundreds of emails everyday. Some days, I have such a steady stream of requests coming via teams messages I work out of that all day. I easily miss 80% of emails or more and just randomly purge them all. I agree with her, if it’s a real need they’ll ask again. If I didn’t see your email the day it came, I probably never will.
Whenever I leave for an extended period, I tell my friend to forward me any emails she thinks are important.
I then delete everything but hers (usually 0-3).
I share the same sentiment. If they emailed me directly and didn’t include my out of office contact, they’ll either follow up again or will have found another means, or better yet just gave up.
On average women in my work take 9-12 months mat leave, and the company shuts down your email when you are away. That way you come back to an empty inbox.
Whenever I go on 2-3 week holidays I always say I will just delete my inbox, but then never have the balls to do it haha
It gives you the out and precedent. I would still archive the emails, because thats how I am. But your message isn't wrong. It means that people shouldn't expect a response to emails sent during your absence, and removes any pressure from you that you had to respond. If it's important, contact you when you're back.
My company locks us out when on leave like that. I like it because I could ignore the inbox when I got back from paternity leave. The company does it as a CYA. They don't want anything weird with an FMLA claim if someone says "welllll... Technically I was doing emails that week" or something like that
You can just set an “our of office” message.
And like, yeah there will be 10% of ass hats that are just ass hats.
Oh of course we set an OOO message. That's how we can ignore stuff when we come back. Great team I work with. If they didn't care, the whole thing collapses
And honestly anyone who doesn’t know who your soup is doesn’t really need to be contacting you
Just set up an out of office response that tells the sender that you are away and the email has been deleted, that they can send it to you again on x date.
Tell me you’re not American without telling me you’re not American
I'm American and take 21 days every year. Get yall selves a union
Also American. I took 4 weeks off to road trip with my kids this summer, and I still have 90+ hours of PTO rolling over to next year.
Are you saying 21 days total or 21 days in a row?
Because the previous commenter was clearly talking about being gone on one trip for 2-3 weeks (pretty uncommon in the US) but you seem to be talking about taking a total of 21 vacation days over the course of the year (which is incredibly common in the US, at least for people with salaried jobs).
To be fair when you next have a couple weeks off and hesitate deleting those emails think on what i was taught on a management course.
"Delete everything over 3 days old, if it was important or requires attention they will send a follow up just as you would if you hadn't had a response."
I just read the last 3 days of mails and put all the rest as read. I don’t care about previous mails, but I keep them just in case
Ehh if it's important theyll follow up or figure out the answer elsewhere. If anything you're making some people more self sufficient
My boss went on her first real vacation in years - was gone for 2 weeks. Her out of office said "if this is urgent contact [me], if not email me on x date when im back.
One way of sorting in order of importance
I have PTO scheduled for the week of Christmas. I intend on forgetting I existed at work for 8 days. Why? Because Vince did it to me all summer when I covered for him while he was sneaking off to Seattle under Sean's nose every other week.
Sean really needs to pay more attention
This year has been a mess.
Fair enough. Sean, though, needs to be more aware — and Vince needs to stop taking advantage of the situation. Don’t put up with the BS Josh my man, you’re above having to deal with their fuckassery. That said, enjoy your Christmas break big dog!!
I think the one thing that's really fucked up about it the most is Sean is our Regional District Ops Manager. The company I work for had to part ways with the Local Operations Manager leaving a big leadership gap at that level and Vince and I were needed. But dude decided he finally wanted a love life which ended up backfiring on him. Even knocked this chick up and stressed her out to the point of miscarriage. He's been a shit head and continues to be a shit head with the new Ops manager.
Sounds like an opportunity for you to get a leg up in the company is brewing. Let him be a shit head and expose his lack of value while you continue to show your worth and maybe you’ll be telling Vince what to do soon enough.
At any rate, sorry you’ve gotta put up with the nonsense brother. Hopefully it sorts itself out before too long. Peace and grease my dude ✌️
If you think that's bad, my boss Andy went off sailing for three months and his own Boss David didn't find out until after he was already back
What a different world they live in lol. I had a boss once ask me what I thought about two comparative Mercedes that were both $140k plus cars. I told him I’ve never driven anything close to that because I made 36k before taxes lmao
This was an Office reference. They do live in another world.
Fair enough lol, I did not realize that.
An ex boss I had told me a story of how she and her boyfriend were looking at yachts and were shown a set of yachts $15-$20k less than their estimated budget and she was surprised at how they were still good quality compared to the more expensive ones. I was making $13 an hour.
I had a boss ask me something about a ski boat, to be fair I had talked about waterskiing a lot that summer, and what he should get. He was looking at a $150k boat (in 1998 lol). I had a 14ft welded aluminum. The tire and rim package he was looking at for the trailer cost more than my trailer lol
My boat was set up for fishing on the west coast of Canada (between Vancouver Island and the mainland) so I used to help feed myself, and used it year-round between the fishing, waterskiing and going camping in remote areas. He wanted a ski boat for 3 months of summer lol
Classic Vince haha. Sean really needs to step it up and keep a better eye on things :/
U americans just need to be a bit more chilled about work. Who the fuck cares whats going on at work while being on pto?! I wouldnt even care if the whole place burns to the groud.
We aren’t “chill” about work because we have no rights. Europeans would be having heart attacks at 47 too if your child’s diabetes medication was totally dependent on your job which is controlled by some asshole middle managers interpretation of you
Therein lies your problem: The USA is the land of the middleman. ‘Health insurance’ is the biggest scam of all time. It’s like forcing the citizens of Bikini Bottom to buy flood insurance.
what happened to gun ownership to fight back against the tyranny of the government? i thought those weren't supposed to be just for show?
Please give me a rundown on how you would outfit yourself to go take on the government. When the knife/hellfire missile comes your way, what system you go for response? Green tip in a PMag and a $900 optic? Good luck lol
Pssshhh they ain't gettin me in my tactical vest I got at a flea market with a punisher logo patch on it!
He’s making fun of the fact that a lot of Americans defend the 2nd amendment simply because they want to have guns, and not because of the ostensible reason that those rights exist (to use guns to fight back against the government), which as you pointed out would be absurd nowadays.
No no no the guns are to help us defend the billionaires from the tyranny of the people!
Nah it's a culture thing. A few Americans I've met have clearly made their career their whole identity and can't understand why everyone else doesn't do the same. There's a difference between caring about your employer and caring about being employed. Nobody wants to be fired, you guys aren't unique.
Any manager I've had has always been a human first, worker drone second. They don't hear from me when I'm off because they don't want to hear from me when they're off.
Also "Europeans" is referencing half a billion people. We don't all live the same way.
Nah Europeans are one homogeneous group of techno listening tight pants. I’ve met some Europeans and the few limited experiences I’ve had with them reinforces my belief system so I have it all figured out. I’m sorry to tell you but you don’t know fucking shit about living in our shithole country. The few Americans you’ve met probably also visited whatever place you’re from which means the have the money to travel. Congrats at meeting the most privileged in our society and basing your judgements
I’m Canadian. When I am off work, I slip into my faraday cage onesie
so American bosses can’t ruin my day off by proxy.
I came to say this. I work for a French company and my favourite this is everyone disappears for August. It’s like the world stops, everyone chills out and spends a month with their family.
For real. Crazy that not working during your time off from work is seen as an act of rebellion
Was he in leave? Cause if so good for him. And you. You’re on leave. If someone contacts you from work for any reason except to go for a pint. The only response is somewhere between ‘I will find out when I get back’ to ‘go fuck yourself, I’m on holiday’ depending on how much you like them.
Unbravo Vince!
Classic Vince move. Honestly, where does he get off
For maternity leave? Absolutely. Returning from maternity leave should be like your first day on the job.
Could be American which means maternity leave was maybe a few weeks…
Yea it's kinda weird as a bloke to think I'm never gonna to be in a situation. Most I'll ever have of is probably a month. Fucking hell that's grim.
In my country there's also a paternity leave.
We get a pathetic 2 weeks here. Also not sure on the ROI on having a kid for the pat leave
I work for a company in the UK where our paternity leave is being increased from 2 weeks to 16 starting next year
Fuck me you hiring mate
Ours is 12 weeks
Damn! In my country you get 1 years paternity leave
I think here you get 2 weeks right after the child is born, and then a month or two more which you can you at any point during the first 3 years.
My ex manager had 3 kids, and used the paternity leave for all 3 of them at the same time. He was gone for 6 months.
We have a system where each parent gets 160 days which can be used anytime during the first 2 years of your kids life. If the kid is premature you both get extra time off and the 160 days each start from the assumed due date.
Laughs at 2 weeks in American
Laughs at that’s a State law!
Go to the bum fuckery areas and it’s nil for maternity and paternity leave.
Iowa here, paternity is 1 week but the real atrocity is that maternity is 2 weeks.
Edit to clarify: The state requires none, so this appears to be the standard. Employees are expected to use PTO and then FMLA if they want longer.
Head to a better state! Washington supports you for up to 12 weeks off
Child free at 40 and shopping around for a vasectomy as we speak
I'm not trying to start anything out have a go at anyone but let's remember that parenting leave isn't vacation. Some people find it more enjoyable than their jobs but a lot don't and either way it is demanding and exhausting.
It is as long as you REALLY enjoy putting washing on.
Damn that's horrible. My wife makes probably 6-7x what I make so I ended up taking paternity leave for about 10 months with our first born.
Nice. I'm fully remote at least so I've got to be with my boy almost every day of his three years so far, it's been special man
That really sucks. It's 69 weeks where I live, and my work is 4 months paid. That's for men or non birthing partners (lesbians, women who adopt, etc).
Nice
You should go to another country then
May work for certain jobs, for others not
Yea that’s not gonna work if you are supposed to be responsible for anything with long term impact. At the very least you need to know the current status of your projects etc. maybe if you are an individual contributor you can treat it like you started a new job.
In the US maternity leave is like 2 weeks
I love this for her. But I do not have the type of job where I can just say ah fuck whatever happened during those months. I may need that info later or reference it. This sounds like someone who is just focused on daily tasks rather than long-term projects.
Is... Is that not the normal way of handling those?
Usually youd actually parse through them a bit before deleting them. I for one dont even read my emails. Let alone delete them
It really depends. I have some co-workers who'll delete everything not directly sent to them because it's just too much to keep up with
Why would you delete an email? I mark them as read. I have never purposefully deleted an email.
Maybe he archives them, not sure. But our work emails get autodeleted after a few years. A very large percentage is also just automated notifications about stuff that happens elsewhere, such as comments on a ticket system that you can just find there if you still need it
I also don't delete emails on my personal account unless it's spam
Not every email warrants a response. I still archive those work emails for reference later. My paper trail is eternal! On X day at 3:33 PM you stated...
Cuz fuck them emails?
Maternity leave is 12 months in most places (not the US). No fucking way is anyone going through a year of emails that aren't even relevant anymore. The out of office should have pointed them to someone who could help in your absence anyway.
Yep. Do an Out of Office reply saying "Your email has been deleted. It has not been forwarded. Please contact so-and-so until my return".
This - only delete them all if you have said you will in an autoreply. Otherwise some of those people will be thinking, "she'll reply once she has got through her email backlig on her return," and some of those will be opportunities for you, not the sender.
We are actually expected by management to do so for absence of two weeks or more. Alternatively it's fine to ask IT to deactivate the account for that timespan
I totally understand the sentiment, but if this is your approach to email, you cannot also be the person who complains about meetings that could have been an email.
This is the most frustrating colleague to work with, because whatever the mode of communication- they somehow always find a way to absolve themselves of engagement in any process and make it someone else’s problem.
Part of my job is to get people together to engage in a collective decision making process before a deadline where I have to deliver the outcome. Once the outcome has been delivered, you suddenly get loads of ‘helpful’ feedback on things that now cannot be changed… and the cycle continues.
It’s parental leave… pretty good exception given the duration and need to have had someone else covering their role during the leave.
this is what pass-downs are for
So now when they start the process of giving her work back to her she deletes her email?
I'm on month 10 of maternity leave. Going back in 2. Are you proposing that I read through every email? Or the person who I trained to cover me, and gave access to my email gives me a thorough handover?
Yeah it's insane lmao, several months of emails to wade through after mat leave?? Who the hell is reading all of that?! Even the most recent threads will require context!
There's a big difference between extended leave and what the poster was talking about organizing decisions. If youre gone for an extended period, not your problem. If you're ignoring company/planning related communications while working, is a completely different issue
They brought a completely different scenario from what OP has shown and got mad about it.
Obviously anyone who's a blatantly bad coworker would be horrible to work with - no one would argue with this. Water is wet, the sky is blue etc., these are well known and this too seems unnecessary to mention.
I don't understand where the need is to bring that up alongside a post about someone returning from maternity leave, it's clearly a very different scenario but folks who do take mat leave are already given enough flack for taking 'an extended vacation' (eyeroll) and women face enough discrimination in the workplace without needing to add any more negativity to maternity leave, I don't think there was any need to then bring up generally bad coworkers.
It may seem like a little thing but it really isn't.
It's a Contrarian thing and they just like to argue/rant, I have a friend who insists on every conversation turning into a hypothetical I never mentioned, as if it's some Gotcha when in reality it has no relation to what we're talking about.
And this isn't said as some dig against them or my friend, we all do it too just to a lesser or greater degree. Some people are just really bad about it.
Not at all! If you are the sort of person who fully engages in conversations and meetings then you’ll be up to speed in no time.
I’m saying that there are people who will do this and also complain about attending meetings which ‘should have been an email’.
Also you are lucky to have proper maternity cover- this isn’t always the case!
Depends on the job.
At my last place there were easily 300 emails per day, all trouble tickets and bullshit mixed in.
So after just a few weeks it would be overflowing with 10s of thousands of emails to sort through, best to just delete all that shit. If I'm needed for any of that when I get back it can be forwarded to me ..
VS now at my current job, there's maybe 5 to 10 emails per week, most of it reminders, less of it is just anniversary/birthday shoutouts
Where do you work that you actually expect a thorough hand over? They will give you the highlights, if you want more understanding you probably will need to filter through some of the emails and ask follow up questions.
It took me four hours to delete the emails when I got back. And it was only external. Id delete and the server would send more. Rinse and repeat for hours. And I had to delete them to be able to send an email. I was gone for 13 months.
I've been on parental leave for 18 months plus 4 months of vacation I saved up. Why would someone emailing me over a year ago be read? It's no longer important.
I have two thoughts on that. 1. If someone is on leave you should consider they don't exist during leave. If someone is that important to a decision there should be more than one person that can make that decision. 2. Many times when people aren't providing feedback at the appropriate times it's a process or organizational issue. They could be providing the feedback to their direct managers. They could only be brought into the project piecemeal and only see the full picture after the change. They could be under empowered in their role (multiple rounds of taking on the responsibilities of former employees without an official job change). It could be a lot of things.
I say this as someone that goes through this a lot at work and sees both sides. If it's a continual problem across multiple employees chalking it up to a problem with how they work is more or less you doing the same thing. Talk to your leadership about what can be done to fix your company's inherent problems.
Then that's a failure of leadership on your part.
If you constantly gather people together for decisions and don't get feedback until afterwards then what does that tell you? You need to change your approach to get the best out of the team.
I was gone for 5 working days and I ended up with around 587 mails when I came back. Around 10% were status updates from Jira and another 10% HR stuff - birthdays, his story, her story, we are a family and all…but rest were genuine work mails! Took me a week to get through them.
don’t delete them, you might need to reference that info. mark everything as “read” and anything that’s actually important or needs follow up - they’ll send you another email that you can respond to.
Weird to not need to know what is happening in a business
You read the last week, maybe two weeks of emails and delete the rest. It's that simple. All other news you pick up from meetings and casual chat.
The redditors celebrating this are the same people who complain about not getting promoted because they don't socialize enough at work. The average redditor has a woefully unimportant entry level job and puts in as little effort as humanly possible.
Or isn't American and has right to disconnect laws and workplace protections that don't require you to spend every waking moment thinking about work.
In an Aussie, out working conditions are quite good, and I still think this is stupid, and demonstrates a general lack of forethought at best, and an absolute disregard for the people around you at worst.
Icelandic here, and the best advice a executive at a company I worked for gave me is to not chase missed phone calls or old emails, if it was important they will call/e-mail again, lowers the stress a lot when you are swamped at work. We also just got informed of anything important when we got back from vacation, no need to check any messages received while we were away, not even if we were just sick for a day.
That is very different from outright deleting them. If something is needed later, someone might tell you to reference the email sent on x date as happens in any business or even personal communication. The OP post is probably made up or if real the person is just plain stupid and perhaps added work for the IT department because they will now need to undelete her emails if something comes up.
I'm definitely not recommending that they should read through an entire years worth of archival emails, but like what's wrong with just marking as read?
Put em in a folder if you need your inbox to be clear, but immediately making a hard commitment to just be totally out of the loop and with no way to get yourself any part of the way back in is crazy to me.
The average person has a woefully unimportant entry level job lol
If everyone was a high flyer, then nobody would be average.
If it's important, someone would tell you in person.
Absolutely not. Or when it's too late
And this is a reason why offices do meetings that could have been E-mails.
98% of corporate email that we get is anyway spam. And those other 2% are also not relevant for my daily work.
In your work email you get spam? What do you subscribe to with work emails? Or does the corporate send unnecessary stuff?
I get about 250 emails a week and 3 of them will be relevant.
A lot of shite like:
etc.
I will occasionally just highlight the 300+ unread emails and just mark them as read and get on with my day. If I'm needed, they'll get in touch directly.
Not the person you're asking, but in my case I need to take action on a small fraction of the emails coming into my inbox.
Why do I get so much "junk"? I own a lot of customer facing email groups, and actively monitor them to make sure things are being picked up correctly, and jumping in when I need to. I also get copied into a lot of emails directly.
There are also a lot of corporate emails that are kind of spam. I get something like 200-300 emails most days, and only about half of those are in English.
So much of it is just people covering their ass and forwarding emails from someone else. Just useless "FYI". It's brutal.
Good luck if those were external emails.
Some countries it's totally standard to have your email auto delete incoming messages while your out of office is set.
I've had this several time in germany, just get the auto answer: person XY isnt available at the moment, this email will not get redirected to his/her substitute.
Had a colleague return from sick leave after a burn out. Asked him how he would start up and he told me heb was planning on working through his e-mail.
Told him to select all and dump it straight into the bin. Noone in a company is irreplaceable. The company moves on when you are away. Sp anything older than 2 weeks is already forgotten.
My boss currently has 34k unread emails in his inbox. When I told him that would give me intense anxiety he replied with “I get paid to execute a scope of work, answering every email I receive is not part of that scope of work.” Yes, my boss is pretty cool.
She's right. Let the "out of office" message do the work.
When I was an operations manager, I went on vacation across the world with my family. I can't remember my exact wording because it was 10 years ago, but my put of office message was basically "I am on vacation with no access to work emails. I return on XX date. Upon my return, I will be marking all unread emails as read. If you still require my attention by the time I've returned from vacation, please send me an email Monday morning. "
It was the best decision I ever made. I do that every time now.
Absolute madlad way to deal with email anxiety. Can we all just take a moment to appreciate how powerful the 'If they really need to talk to me, they'll find me' mindset is?
I actually did this as well. I didn’t delete them, I just unhighlighted everything and paid attention to just team meetings and chats. It’s incredibly liberating
This is the way. Im a level 3 at a NOC. I take on average 50 calls a day and 75 emails a day. 12 hr shift. Coming back from a week off can have 400 emails. I right click, mark all as read. It’s not logistically possible to read all that. Been at my company 8 years.
I just move them into a folder and pretend I'm going to look at them.
But seriously, as a manager there is nothing more frustrating than the person who returns from leave and a week later they are still going through their emails.
As a manager, nothing is worse than people doing their job and ensuring important information isn't just fucking gone, ignored, deleted, or unread?
The fuck.
Sorry. I wasn't clear - my bad! I meant people who don't do any other work other than read emails forever.
I always prepare a return document for all of my team - every change, things to be aware of etc and I attach any important emails that actually need to be read.
But some staff insist on reading everything (including all the 'jokey' emails) before they do anything else. Really annoying if someone has been gone for 12 months or more.
How long is the leave in your country? If you've been on leave for 18 months why would people read emails over a year old?
They're on leave, given that they take precautions like having an automated reply on their email and having coverage then it's perfectly reasonable if they "miss" something.
Hell, you're the manager, you should make damn sure that their work is accounted for and taken care of when they're on leave.
Once had a colleague who did this after every vacation he took: select first to last email received during his time off and delete all.
Guy was lazy as fuck and just shrugged it off: they'll resend it if they really need me.
Wait til she finds out I never even open my work email
I am 42 now and I started doing this last year. Generally after a week of PTO 2-4 emails will be resent to me they say “2nd request”
You have backups for a reason, life goes on
"I pushed all my fucks out with the baby, sorry"
Almost none of them are important and if they are, either someone else has already taken care of it or the person will follow up.
Mark as read seems the more professional option
I feel like I am dying alittle reading most of these comments. Maybe it’s just my job but I can’t imagine how many important files, comments, threads and wha could be vital history got deleted in snap of a finger and how many Redditors seems to agree with this.
Deleting the threads on who did what and why they did it…. How many project files are deleted that could have been sent from a third party or vendor. I am sickened
Doesn’t really work if one of the emails is sent from Spain, another one from Malaysia and the third one from Colombia and your workplace is in neither of these countries.
I have done this exact same thing. It’s truly an amazing feeling.
This is the thing people thinking sending it your inbox makes it your to do list/problem. No it doesn’t.
But that’s often how I deal with ours at work. If I reacted to every email I received then I would get nothing looked at or done. Learning to ignore most things is a powerful tool. Knowing or having a spidey sense into what is important is necessary.
lol. I’ve been out of work for 2 months for a surgery and I go back Monday. I would really love to do this 😜
if im not in "the office" I don't exist. i'm paid only for very specific hours, thus the only emails i ever respond to when not on the clock, are emails about when i will next be on site. i'm not salaried. i'm hourly; we only need agree on what hours i am i working, and i will work those hours and respond to business within those hours
I do that from time to time. I get so much crap, random cc’s and fyi’s I can’t keep up with it. I just select all and archive it.
Shit I do this after two weeks off. Let alone 9-12 months
No shame in declaring email bankruptcy. Just email top ten senders to tell them that you declare email bankruptcy and then select all and delete. Cleaner slate and it comes off your email credit report in 7 to 10 years.
I have a colleague who refers to this as "email bankruptcy" I love her so much
Wait, sorry. Doesn't everyone do that?
Shift-click delete.
Which is why i only give my phone number to my direct supervisor in case i cant come in unexpectedly, that fucker gets blocked as soon as i get on pto lol
My boss took a sabbatical of a few weeks, coupled with some saved up PTO. When he got back, I asked him about his inbox. He said "I just deleted everything older than two weeks. If they really need me, they'll message me again."
I live by that core idea. Nothing's important until it is. (at work)
I do this when I come back from PTO. IF it's important enough, they will reach out again.
My father was president of a financial institution and would clear his inbox at the end of every day. He said “for anything urgent they’ll call and if it was important they’ll send it again.” Held the job for nine years (nearly tripling assets) until voluntary retirement.
I'm not much different at work - I don't check my email because if you are supposed to be able to reach me, you know I don't use email.
to be able to do this kind of move without any anxiety is my life goal now
This is me after more than 1 day off. Like if it’s important someone will tell me.
I did this after medical leave once. Sorted by date, and anything older than a week was deleted.
I read my emails three times a day, once when I start, then after lunch, and once before I leave, if it is important, they will email again or call me
I haven't deleted an email from my inbox in 8 years
She knows they can’t fire her after a maternity leave
I made a subfolder in outlook called !irrelevant and made many rules that moved mails to there. Once or twice I missed free chocolate handouts but nothing major.
I archive without reading until my gmail is empty. I do it about once every quarter. Same with slack-click-to-read without reading.
Email/slack bankruptcy I call it.
I use the exact same line—most of these are now 2-3mo old. If it’s important, they’ll resend it.
These are all internal tools btw, very few customer facing anything.
lol i do this, except i say if they really need me they will reach out again
When I started work as a claims agent for an e-commerce company, the very first thing that happened was that a freight provider lost 8000 packages. This took about a week to be noticed and the email was just flooded with messages from customers wondering where their chinese crap was and the support crew just couldn't reply to them all. When it was found out that the freight provider had basically just fucked the company over and ran with the money the CEO decided to send out new packages to all these customers via the regular freight service procifer and 4000 email messages was just deleted. What was in those messages? Nobody knows.
Also, a month and a half later a postal courier rolls of eight wagons of packages that has now been returned and guess who has to go over each fucking one on top of his regular workload?
Email is mostly garbage and should be handled accordingly. Only useful as a CYA if you're accused of dropping the ball, otherwise there are like 5 better ways to communicate, with face-to-face in 1st place.
Standard practise whenever I return from a holiday of a week or longer.
Get payed to just go through emails is the easiest day ever.
I barely respond to emails anyway. Most of it is redundant shit someone already told me in person and if it’s really that important they can pick up the phone that resides not two feet away from them and call me.
Beast mode
NO-ONE needs people like that in their office.
CTRL-A Shift Del
Known as “email bankruptcy “. Surprisingly effective
Currently out on maternity leave, I don’t think I could do that but I appreciate her logic
I actually put in my out of office message that I will be deleting all my email upon return and if they need something to contact me directly when I get back.
Back when I had a job, I would be gone for a couple days and the sky was falling. I would return to work with emails demanding to know why I hadn’t responded.
The automatic reply was always set to “I am OOO without access to email and I’ll address issues upon my return.” However that statement wasn’t obvious enough for some people.
I’m a big proponent in not doing anything work related on the weekend or while out on PTO.
Birthday and caring for humans more impt than fkn emails!
Honestly this works outside of work too
whew
I’ve been doing this since starting to work in offices. Never has been an issue.
My mate does this when he goes away for any longer than a week
I once worked with a manager who said when his inbox got out of hand, he’d deal with a third, delete a third and ignore a third. I asked him how he knew which ones were ‘safe’ to delete/ignore and he just shrugged.
After being off work for 12 months this is the move for sure!!! Start fresh!
Deleting emails is terrifying in of itself
I’ve done this but “mark as read”…good enough
Anytime I'm out of the office I delete my emails when I return. If the sender is too stupid or too arrogant to read my out of office message then they can resend it on their time.
If it was important they'll reach back out. Easy way to filter out what was actually important.
Edit: my ooo says basically I won't be reading email while I'm out and to contact me on "X" return date.
My coworker just took a week off and came back to 500 emails. women get 16 weeks here in the US. I wouldve done the same 🤣
Hero
A colleague of mine leaves an out of office saying she won’t read any emails received while on leave, and to resend your email after she’s back, if you want a reply. It’s pretty effective actually.
Napoleon used to wait 3 weeks to open letters after he got them. The issues that were not important would get solved in that time and the important stuff was still pending and he’d take care of it after reading the letters.
I watched this happen, except instead of deleting them she closed her email and put in her two weeks lol.
One lady I worked with read an email and then deleted it. She had zero saved emails in her inbox.
I think about her every so often.
When I was on leave I would always set a rule for all emails to go into a folder and of course I had an auto reply.
That way when I came back I didn’t feel overwhelmed by my inbox But I could also go through the folder of emails to see if there was anything really important that I missed.
To me that was the best of both worlds.
"Anyone whose office chair needs replacement, write back before the 15th to get a new one."
4 weeks later
"Yay, new chairs! Where's mine?"
I’m an admin for the Emr at a hospital, and get hundreds of emails everyday. Some days, I have such a steady stream of requests coming via teams messages I work out of that all day. I easily miss 80% of emails or more and just randomly purge them all. I agree with her, if it’s a real need they’ll ask again. If I didn’t see your email the day it came, I probably never will.
Whenever I leave for an extended period, I tell my friend to forward me any emails she thinks are important.
I then delete everything but hers (usually 0-3).
I share the same sentiment. If they emailed me directly and didn’t include my out of office contact, they’ll either follow up again or will have found another means, or better yet just gave up.