Otherwise, a referral to your company’s general contact email or a simple ‘I’ll respond when I get back, stop bugging me’ should do the trick.
Thank you for your email. I’m currently out of the office until [date] to celebrate the holiday with my loved ones—without my phone in front of my face.
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Sometimes teams need the extra nudge to disconnect...here are our tips for getting your team to unplug from email over the holidays.
Thanks so much for your email. I’ve decided to take advantage of the holiday weekend and truly take [Monday/Friday] off. In an effort to come back fully recharged, I won’t be checking my email. Don’t worry though, if it’s urgent, you can reach out to [name] at [email address].
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.
Hello, We are currently closed for the holiday. If it’s something urgent you can email [name] at [email]. Kind regards. [Name/signature]
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.
If you are going on a vacation, try to surprise your customers with an Out of office message that appears on your behalf and tension free and enjoy the vacation.
Our auto-replies to outside people are two or three paragraphs long though, which feels ridiculous but is actually necessary.
Is your email urgent? If so, you should probably call [Name] at [phone number], and they will assist you. They aren’t in the sunshine – they’re still at work.
I guess it’s relatively minor, but I once emailed a local government official with a question about building permits (just as a citizen, not work-related) at about 10am on a Monday and got an out-of-office reply stating she’d be back “Monday” with no date. So I had no idea whether she was already back and hadn’t turned off the message yet, in which case, not urgent, I’ll wait, or was out for a week, in which case, I’d like to ask someone else. Not a big inconvenience, but it was so illogical not to give a date that it really drove me crazy
"Hello, you've reached [name] at [company]. I'm unable to come to the phone right now. Leave your name and number, and I'll return your call as soon as I'm free. Thank you."
Funny emails are getting trendy, but they have to be used properly. If you are absolutely sure that your recipients will have a chuckle, go ahead and write a funny out-of-office auto-reply. It might make their day.
Luckily for you, my colleague *Name* generously offered to cover for me. You can reach him/her at *email*.
Mike Vardy is a writer, speaker, productivity strategist, and founder of Productivityist. He is the author of The Front Nine: How to Start the Year You Want Anytime You Want, The Productivityist Playbook, and TimeCrafting: A Better Way to Get the Right Things Done, coming soon from Mango Publishing.
Out-of-office auto-replies that keep happening over and over on CC’ed email threads.