Happy holidays! I am currently out of the office, with no email access. I’ll be returning on (insert date) and will get back to you as soon as I can. Happy holidays!
In 2013, researcher danah boyd wrote a LinkedIn blog post advocating for the nuclear option which was framed in the piece as an “email sabbatical.” Coming back to an empty inbox after a vacation is should be a break from the insanity, not a procrastination of it,” boyd wrote of the decision to send everything to the trash.
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My voicemail is set up to forward to my email. I did this years ago, way before the Late Unpleasantness. And it’s perfect for working remotely. (I have trained my students to use email. My colleagues hate voicemail too, so we use email and gchat. Or walk down the hall when we’re live and in person)
When one of my colleagues is out of the office, he doesn’t mess around. In fact, he’s turned his auto-responses into a running series of commentary from fictional cartoon character Troy McClure.
'The very fact you were content to type out your query long hand and settle back to wait for a reply suggests you can wait' (Credit: Getty Images)
Out of town? Your callers should know. Let them know with the following vacation voicemail greetings.
*using a professional email marketing solution you can personalize your emails by using your customers’ first name as well as other personalized tokens containing info you have about your customers
I’m the same. I don’t find it condescending, it’s kinda eye-rolly but also kinda charming! I get why it could be annoying if you need info quickly. But really, why not inject a little silliness into boilerplate messages like this, as long as it’s not disrespectful or really out of step with your field culture?
I’ll reply to your message promptly, after I delete the dozen email newsletters about losing weight. If your question or request is not time sensitive, wonderful! If you require immediate assistance, please send contact to [insert name] at [contact email].
I accidentally left my slightly-more-than-professionally-testy “I am out of the office due to a lapse in government funding” voicemail greeting up for a couple months after funding was restored, oops.
The reason I did it was that the first time I took maternity leave, I came back to thousands of irrelevant emails. It was a chore to sort through them, and finding the ones that were still relevant was like finding a needle in a haystack. And it wasn’t just a waste of *my* time – I often had to reach out to email senders only to hear that no further action was needed, so I was wasting their time too.
I think the problem is that “at your earliest convenience” is a formulaic convention that uses explicit, almost exaggerated politeness to basically issue a stern direction, meaning “as soon as you possibly can”. When you turn it into “at my earliest convenience” it’s unclear if you mean “whenever it’s convenient for me to get to it” (what the words say) or “as soon as I possibly can” (what the meaning of the formulaic original is). Or else it sounds like you didn’t quite understand how “at your earliest convenience” works.
1) Communicate when a person will be back, or if they are out for an indeterminate period of time, tell me who I should be contacting instead 2) Communicate what I should expect. (For example, when I do my monthly reports, I have an out of office message that says that I’ll be slow to respond. I *will* actually check my email at least a couple of times, but I generally won’t respond to anything non-urgent.) 3) If the person is in a job that handles urgent requests, list who I need to contact instead if it can’t wait until they get back.
We had to do this at my prior position so that agents knew that we were in the office that specific day. Now i dont even use my phone as most internal people call me on Teams.
As a matter of courtesy – and to give you the peace of mind needed to be present wherever you are going (either away from the office or on vacation) – you should send each of your clients a simple email to let them know you’ll be away. Below I’ve offered some sample text for to you use as a template. Feel free to make it a TextExpander snippet, Gmail canned response, or whatever. Just use it (or something like it). Please.
Need to set up a generic away message for times you’re away from the phone or need to refocus your attention? Simply throw this template up for a few hours to buy yourself some time. Thank you for contacting Lulu’s, you’ve reached Anne. I’m out of the office currently, but I will respond to your message by 3 pm. Thank you for your patience!