The problem was that this had to be done on deadline and people wanted me to do other things for them that weren’t time sensitive. So I put up an internal-only out of office that basically said “hey sorry I’m working on project X and we have a tight deadline. If this isn’t urgent I’ll get back to you next week. If it is urgent, let me know!”
Click the Out Of Office tab, and in the Date & Time Conditions - One-off section, click + Add date range. Set a date range by clicking the date fields and then selecting a start and end date from the calendars. Set a start/finish time for the dates by clicking the time fields and then dragging the sliders horizontally to select the Hour and Minute. If you want your autoresponse to look like a human response, you can tell eDesk to delay sending this template for x minutes. Pro-tip: You can use this to prevent Amazon from detecting your message as an auto-response. Set Frequency if you want to prevent eDesk from auto-responding with the same template to every message about the same ticket. For OOO templates, it is common practice to select Autoreply every single incoming message but you can also select a frequency, for example, once every 6 hours. If you want to tell eDesk NOT to auto-respond with this template to messages from certain email addresses, enter them into the Exclude field, for example, [email protected], [email protected]. You can also exclude all email addresses from a certain domain by entering *@domain.com, for example, *@xsellco.com Tick this if you want to include the signature for the channel in the template.

If you’re not sure when you’ll return, don’t include dates. Simply direct them to a colleague.
Once they realize that your office is currently closed, the most important piece of information they probably want to know is your standard business hours. While this information can be tucked behind a phone menu option, it's best to state it upfront in your after hours recording.