Being a responsible netizen or professional in the Internet age also means leaving useful clues and messages for your email correspondents whenever you will be out of reach temporarily or permanently. Remember that your email correspondents expect you to respond within minutes or, at most, 24 hours of receiving their emails unless specifically stated in the email that you are free to respond much later.
What we need in our work communication is not more professional politeness or less formal, chat-based messaging applications like Slack. We need honesty. The problem is that we’ve conditioned ourselves to see honesty as self-indulgent or disrespectful. I’d argue the opposite is true. Honesty, even if it’s a bit more inconvenient for all parties in the moment, pays dividends later. It builds trust. When my partner Anne Helen Petersen and I were interviewing people for our forthcoming book on remote work, a frequent lament from both middle managers and workers was that they didn’t feel like they knew how to succeed in their jobs; that they were guessing what their superiors and coworkers wanted and, even when they asked, they didn’t quite trust the responses they got back.

Pro tip: The first works well for both voicemail greetings and email responders, while the next two are most appropriate for emails.
If it’s not important and you’re just a little bit bored then you can amuse yourself with these fun facts until I return. When hippos are upset, their sweat turns red. Bananas are curved because they grow towards the sun. There are approximately 100,000 hairs on a human head. You can buy eel flavoured ice cream in Japan. A group of jellyfish is called a smack.