If you have a job that actually requires labor, like the kind they have in China that can drive you to suicide or put you to work at age ten, you may find this whole topic pretty silly. But Germany’s Daimler has made big waves in the media the last few days by proposing what should just be a sane part of our existence. Which is a principle something like “Hey boss, how ’bout on my day off, you actually leave me the frack alone, instead of acting like it’s just some imaginary day that never arrives?”

Daimler has introduced an auto-delete program for emails to out-of-office workers called “Mail on Holiday”, which issues a reply to the sender that the person is out of the office and that the email will be deleted, and offers contact information for another employee, for pressing matters. I have an associate who has done something like this for years; he deletes all emails when he returns from time off claiming that “if it’s important, they’ll follow up”. Personally, I think he’s an irresponsible idiot, but well, if it’s good enough for Daimler, it’s good enough for me.

But you don’t need to install some fancy software called “Mail on Holiday” to do this, just set up an autoresponder, then delete all your email when you get back from vacation. for how to do it. We just set one up ourselves.

Drop us a line at headoffice@thedailyswipe.com to tell us what you think.