Arianna Huffington deletes her employees emails when on vacation (and you can too)

Enjoying your vacation? How can you, when you have that nagging urge to check your email, and the added anxiety of returning to a mountain of email upon your return?

Arianna Huffington’s wellness company, Thrive Global, adopted a simple solution: During the time an employee is on vacation, new emails are deleted and the sender is urged to callback later.  

“Thank you for your email. I am out of the office … please email me again when I return as this email will be deleted“

Their tool, Thrive Away, takes the pressure off employees to respond to the emails received during vacation. But you don’t need to work at Thrive to employ this strategy. Here are instructions on how to set up your own Delete-and-Reply Vacation AutoResponder using Outlook.

Creating a Delete-and-Reply Rule in Outlook

1. Click File and select Automatic Replies.
2. Check Send automatic replies.
3. Check Only send during this time range and set vacation time.
4. Leave Inside my organization field blank.
5. Click Outside my organizatIon tab and enter a ‘.’
   (This field is required, but will be superseded by the rule template).
6. Click Rules.
7. Click Add Rules.
8. Check Delete and Reply with, then click Template.
9. Enter reply text (for example, “Sorry I’m not home right now, I’m walking on a spiderweb..in Ibizia. Your message has been shredded into less than nothingness. Please contact dmsnyder@moo.cow or re-email me when and if I return”).
10. Close.
11. Click OK, and click Yes to confirm ‘all senders’.
12. OK. OK.

Cheers!

Related reading:

• Quartz article: Arianna Huffington deletes every email
• RSS Feeds Made Simple in Outlook
• DeLorean’s Comeback: Flying Cars

 

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