Seems like a big task, right? Well…wrong. You don’t need to stop by everyone in the office’s desks (if you’re even working in an office these days!) or send out an email to each and every client or lead. The easiest way to do this is by simply changing your voicemail greeting and adding an out-of-office email responder to your email client.
But perhaps we have it all wrong, and are simply enslaving ourselves further to technology by toiling over OOOs that are personality-packed, marketing-friendly perfection. Maybe we need to be altogether more standoffish if we want to make our OOOs really work for us? NYU Professor Meredith Broussard, who’s the author of Artificial Unintelligence: How Computers Misunderstand the World, takes the inspiration for her OOO from US writer, poet and children’s author E.B. White, who once turned down an invitation from President Eisenhower with the words “I must decline, for secret reasons”. Accordingly, Broussard’s OOO reads simply: “I am out of the office, for secret reasons.”

Not sure how that particular storm shook out, but it was a classic example of the owner’s narcissism and need to have all of our lives centered around her business “family” with no boundaries.
THANK YOU!!!!!! As a small business owner, I have struggled with any out of office time, weekends, and after hours. Clients seem to text more often than email these days, and there hasn’t been a way to inform them with “out of office reply”. This article helps me tremendously! Also, there should be more built into our phones for texting like email: read, mark as unread, and prioritize contacts of different rows or colors indicating favorites, contacts, and non-contacts (pesky customers who bombard you afterhours).