I misread that at first and thought you’d said that a random picture of a employee popped up, and was momentarily horrified at the thought of my face appearing on my co-workers screens!
The kicker was when she left we teased apart all of what she had been doing and it amounted to about 10 hours a week worth of work (and she was putting in OT constantly lol)
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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!”
Season’s Greetings! It’s my favorite time of year, which means I’m currently out of the office chugging mugs of cocoa, stuffing my face with cookies, and attempting to fulfill my life-long goal of memorizing every single line of [FAVORITE HOLIDAY MOVIE]. I’ll be back in front of my computer on [DATE] and will respond to your message at that time. If you need immediate assistance, please send an email to [NAME] at [EMAIL] so that the other elves in this workshop can help you out. Happy ho-ho-holidays!
Same. There are a few people that are regularly in charge of things I need from them, but are part time. The vast majority of our office is full time. I have no idea when they’ll get back to me, or if I should email someone else. If I saw an OOO message every time they were gonna be gone Th-Fri, I would learn their schedule faster, and hopefully have the most up to date info about “oh, they changed their schedule due to Memorial Day, I can email them and get a response quicker this week” or whatever the issue is.
So what makes a good automated response that will give you the reassurance you need to keep your work email under control so that you can truly enjoy your holiday?
There is no option on the iPhone Mail app to set the vacation response for emails. However, like iCloud, most of the other email providers are also offering to set an automatic vacation response, including Gmail, Yahoo Mail, HotMail providers.
For comparison my current (not great) boss sent an out of office recently detailing how he would be out because he was on his personal sail boat all day, sailing from vacation destination X back to our port city. At length. In a pandemic. When we all had our wages frozen at the start of the crisis.
International locations, such as Carnegie Mellon University in Qatar, may observe different holidays. Holiday Schedule Official University Holiday FY 2021–2022 (Observed*) FY 2022–2023 (Observed*) Independence Day July 5, 2021 July 4, 2022 Labor Day September 6, 2021 September 5, 2022 Thanksgiving Day November 25, 2021 November 24, 2022 Day After Thanksgiving November 26, 2021 November 25, 2022 Christmas Eve December 23, 2021 December 23, 2022 Christmas Day December 24, 2021 December 26, 2022 New Year's Eve December 30, 2021 December 30, 2022 New Year's Day December 31, 2021 January 2, 2023 Martin Luther King, Jr. Day January 17, 2022 January 16, 2023 Memorial Day May 30, 2022 May 29, 2023 Juneteenth June 20, 2022 June 19, 2023
› Url: https://www.themuse.com/advice/the-outofoffice-template-you-need-when-youre-only-taking-one-day-off Go Now
Come Christmas time, there’s nothing quite like tidying up your desk, shamefully closing your 50 Chrome tabs, and switching on your out-of-office responder for the holidays.
Give yourself some slack when promising people to keep up with their messages. If your vacation ends on January 18, but you know that you won’t be able to check up on old emails for the next couple of days, mention that in your reply.
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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.
As a side note, I put a similar message on my work and cell phones, and once I didn’t change the cell message back for nearly a year. (It was my personal cell number, and only my parents ever left messages.)
That’s also annoying because if it’s not someone I interact with regularly I will wonder if it’s been left on by accident.
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.