Perhaps I’m you guys’ worst nightmare, but for the past couple of years I’ve been writing haikus for my OOO, which give a flavour of what I’m out doing. A couple of examples:
Go ahead to iPhone Settings > Control Center > and include Do Not Disturb While Driving. Now you are ready to manually switch your phone to vacation mode from the control center.
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To spend time with our families this holiday season, our offices will be closed on Friday, December 23rd through Monday, December 26th, 2016. We will resume normal business hours on Tuesday, December 27th.
I'm not actually at the North Pole, but I am preoccupied with wrapping presents, drinking hot chocolate, and listening to festive music. Therefore, I won’t respond to your email until [date]. Thank you for your patience, and I hope you have a wonderful holiday.
And… it’s playing in the background as I write this email. Guess what? I’m on vacation! And I do love my occupation.
It usually isn’t enough to just say you’re out and won’t be responding to messages. You’ve got to give people options for how they can get their issue or request resolved. One of the easiest wins here is to provide alternative contact information. That could mean providing your mobile number while you’re out, or, more commonly, providing the phone number and email of the colleague (or department) that will be covering while you’re away.
Thank you for your email. I’m away from my desk until [return date] trying to corral my kids between family visits and holiday sugar highs.
Note: Sending automatic replies to anyone outside my organization will send your automatic reply to every email, including newsletters, advertisements, and potentially, junk email. If you want to send automatic replies to those outside your organization, we recommend choosing My contacts only.
And if you suspect that you won’t look through all those emails that cluttered up your inbox while you were on a vacation at all? Be honest about it and tell your prospects to contact you again at a certain date.
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Brief Out of Office Message. While it’s vital that you get the main points across in any vacation email, brevity is important. If you’re looking for something a little more to-the-point, try this one
The holidays bring cheer, excitement, and for many, a mailbox full of holiday cards from businesses. As a hard working professional, you may not have the time to craft the perfect holiday card message from your company. That's why we've assembled a list of 50 sample holiday card messages that you can use in this year's holiday cards. From Christmas …
I also tend to check my email 2-3x per day while I’m out for my own sanity and will respond to important* ones if not doing so would hold something big* up. Not using OOO avoids some of the self-righteous nonsense from people with nothing better to do than try to micromanage my personal time.
If you want your message to be formal, avoid using contracted forms such as I’m and I’ll as well as informal or casual language. It’s also a good idea to start your message with an expression of thanks like: If your audience isn’t from your work environment, you could take a risk with something more fun and personalised:
Also, you need to know your audience if you are going to go eccentric. Alison mentions that this message is fine in their culture, but it wouldn’t npbe appropriate for my somewhat formal field. And even if your workplace in general is casual, you might be contacted by someone outside. (In a tiny provincial courthouse I served in the past, there is a story going around that in the 80s a junior but elderly clerk used to address phone callers as hun and sweetheart and generally speak very informally. Most people thought it was funny, and then the President of Supreme Court called and… he didn’t).
If those weren’t bad enough, if anyone on that lists sets up an out-of-office message, it *automatically* replies all. If the email bounces back, it bounces back reply all. One guy left the company and his email had a permanent out-of-office auto reply. The list was quite busy for a month or so and the message popped up multiple times a day.
Literally just “Please note that (date) is a public holiday in (country). I will not be checking my inbox until (next working day).”