Honest communication, even in the form of an email auto reply, is a roadmap. It helps people understand how best to help you and, in turn, allows them to better help themselves. Straightforward expectation setting is a way to be respectful of your coworkers’ time and pressures, but most importantly, it’s a way to be respectful of and guard your time. Even if you don’t feel an intense need to be more open in your workplace correspondence, consider modeling the behavior for others who work with you or, especially, those who work for you. It’s a small change in behavior but it’s a meaningful one. And this summer is the perfect time to start.
At my old job we had a short script for our voice mail messages including whether we were in the office or out of the office. We were specifically told not to say why we were out of the office for personal privacy and protection reasons. However, an exception was soon made–for jury duty. Callers were getting freaked out when they got the message “I’m out of the office and don’t know when I will return.” They would be worried about the person they were calling and worried about whether or not they would be able to get the info they needed. So if on jury duty we would say, “I’m out of the office on jury duty and don’t know when I will return.”

Education Details: When you need to step away from the office and won’t be in touch with your email correspondents, or if you are going on vacation and don’t plan on checking your email messages very often, you’ll probably want to create an out-of-office/email autoresponder email message to let your colleagues, friends, clients, and family know that you are currently unavailable but will be back soon.
We have tested this workaround by placing a sample vacation message on the iPhone DND mode Auto-Reply screen. To check this feature, we manually turned on the iPhone DND mode from iPhone Control Center with the above settings.