My outgoing voicemail message says “Please don’t leave me a voicemail, send me an email instead”
I used to hire a lot (hundreds) of freelance writers who would each be given a deadline by which their particular project was due. As these were large projects, they typically would have several months to complete them. I soon discovered that a significant number of freelancers (at least 25% if I’m remembering correctly) would email a couple of days before their assignment was due to report the sad news that they would be missing their deadline because “someone close to [them] had just died”.
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I had a colleague who simply never answered her phone or set up her voicemail. She still listed the number on her business card and email .sig, she just never answered or checked voicemail. When she took a new job another colleague inherited her phone number and when he went to set up his voicemail there were basically eight years’ worth of messages left for her that he had to delete.
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I know I’m so late on this, but my FAVORITE one I’ve ever gotten was from one of my company’s Presidents (so a very high up muckity muck type).
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One day, the boss said I needed to start answering phones, and did not accept my pushback.
By which I mean to say: I’m on holiday, I’m definitely sunburnt, and I’m sorry I missed your email.
If their message is urgent or they’d like to contact someone else instead, you can let them know what to do.
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Check your insurance is up to date and covers the holiday periodMake sure you have sufficient funds in your business account to cover any regular payments for salaries and other billsClarify with staff their exact leave dates and note themSend out your invoices to clientsPay your supplier invoicesSettle your finances and pays
I’ll be back on [DAY OF WEEK], [DATE]. No explanations, no apologies, no promises to respond, no redirects to other colleagues. It works.
Of course, every message sends a message, even a barebones OOO that seems to say nothing more than that you’re away until next week, so why not try to inject a little personality? You could get quirky by giving your auto-responder robot a personality. You could dispense with words altogether and substitute a gif or emojis. Or how about a little retro concrete poetry – you know, where you arrange your words on the screen to form an image of a palm tree or a pina colada? It might be worth noting here that the amount of personality you inject depends on your trade. What earns you cachet in the creative industries might backfire in the financial sector, for instance.
Labor Day holiday closure | Larimer County. If your message is time sensitive, use urgent in your subject line so i know to reply by the end of the business day. Festive out of office holiday messages provide you with a creative approach to tailor your automated email message to a specific holiday. Out of office message examples. More general requests can be emailed to.
I’ll be back on [DAY OF WEEK], [DATE]. No explanations, no apologies, no promises to respond, no redirects to other colleagues. It works.
Of course he presumably meant working on a trial – yay for regional preposition differences!
The only thing that isn’t boilerplate in mine is the inclusion of “But what if I have a word emergency?” before the who to contact stuff. I removed it at one point and people asked me to put it back in because it made them smile. And yep, we’re writers so the only emergencies we deal with are ones related to words.