I received an interesting e-mail last week from a faculty member in phase retirement. Michael had taken a vacation for two weeks after announcing his phase retirement and upon his return he was inundated with a ton of emails, many of which were meaningless because the event announcement had past. While this was annoying to him, he had a solution!
Michael's solution was to utilize a nifty Outlook tool that allows you the send an email with an expiration date. Once the expiration date happens the email is automatically deleted from the recipients inbox. Brilliant! I will let his email speak for itself.
“Upon returning from vacation and checking email for the first time in a couple of weeks I was reminded of the number of emails that can become outdated before being read. My inbox had lots of messages for meetings and other events that had already occurred by the time I read them. Please consider using the automatic expiration function for emails that have a short shelf life — the notice for the event on Thursday that will be meaningless on Friday. It’s easy. When composing an email go to “options” and then to “tracking” and click on the little arrow in the bottom right corner and you will get a pop-up that includes an automatic expiration for the email.
This email automatically expires in a week.
”
So simple! I wish I could train everyone to do this on their emails. Don't you think it would make it so much better to take vacation if you could avoid the onslaught of emails? Or how about maternity leave? Having been on maternity leave for 11 weeks this past year I would love if I didn't have to come back to emails that were expired. What do you think about this tip?