There’s no better feeling than setting an out-of-office message before leaving for a vacation.
That is until you continue to receive endless “urgent” emails that aren’t actually urgent.
Workers are burned out and exhausted, and they want to enjoy their breaks when they have them. To get the message across, more and more people are ditching polite OOO emails and leaving more blunt automated replies.
Peter Harrison, a 29-year-old interior designer from Portland, Oregon, explains in his automated reply that he is “out on PTO” and won’t be checking email — and encourages the sender to do the same, the Wall Street Journal reported.
“By doing so, you will help foster a workplace that is people first, respects paid time off, promotes balance, and dismantles always-on culture,” the email candidly states.
Harrison told the outlet that he used to leave standard out-of-office replies but became more and more overwhelmed by the influx of messages he still received.
“We live in a culture where our time and energy is everyone else’s to take from us,” he shared. “This email says that maybe we can all do better.”
Barry Ritholtz, the 62-year-old chairman and chief investment officer of Ritholtz Wealth Management, is just as blunt in his automated reply: “I am out of the office having way more fun than communicating with you,” his reply says, according to the Journal. “I will likely forget to email you back.”
“During this time, I will be out of the office, not checking emails, avoiding texts, ignoring Slack, letting calls go to voicemail, off the grid, and generally unreachable. As such, my auto-responder is, well, auto-responding,” he wrote later in the email, adding that if it’s truly an emergency, they can contact Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell, Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen and the People’s Bank of China.
“There’s this wrong belief that if you email someone you are entitled to an immediate response,” he explained. “This message says to slow your roll. Why do you need this now?”
A 2023 article from the Harvard Business Review echoed that an OOO response should set up boundaries, noting that “if someone’s message is really that significant, they’ll follow up.”
Daniel Sieberg, author of “The Digital Diet,” has also encouraged people to write in their email that they won’t be reading or responding to anything while away and to follow up after they return if it’s important.
Bing Chen, a former YouTube executive who currently runs an investment firm and a nonprofit, warns that in your message you shouldn’t be promising any sort of response at all, especially when you know you won’t have time to respond, he told WSJ.
Chen’s out-of-office message — “If this is urgent, take a deep breath because few things really are” — has previously gone viral on social media. It acts as a tribute to his late father, who died young.
“It’s a reminder to focus on what’s truly important,” he added.
On top of being straightforward with OOO messages, people are leaving them on even after they come back to give them time to catch up without the added stress.
When Katie Gold, 32, an assistant professor who runs a research lab at Cornell University, returned from her maternity leave, she edited her automated reply to say she “recently” returned and is “catching up on significant backlog,” then thanked the sender for their patience with delayed replies.
She’s planning on keeping this response until her baby turns 1.
“I am drowning in emails from people who all want something from me,” Gold shared with the Journal. “The responder at least makes me feel better about ignoring people. They’ve gotten a response.”
Research shows that the number of emails sent and received worldwide each day has increased 34% since 2017 — and that doesn’t even include messages incoming from other platforms, such as Slack or Teams.
According to Nadya Movchan, a personal brand expert and founder of the communications and growth firm Movchan Agency, 86% of people continue receiving unsolicited emails during vacation.
And the person on the receiving end of the email is always met with more burden than the sender, making the cost and benefit relationship extremely unbalanced, Gloria Mark, professor emeritus in the Department of Informatics at the University of California, Irvine, told WSJ.
“The sender gets the benefit of the email because they are asking for something,” Mark, who studies how people interact with tech in their everyday lives, said. “The receiver, very often, has to do the work.”
Luckily, the receivers of emails tend to overestimate how quickly senders expect responses, according to some research, so there’s no need to fret if you take a bit to get back to an email.
“It feels like every email is a fake emergency,” Erica Dhawan, a St. Petersburg, Florida-based strategy consultant and author of a book about digital communication, told WSJ. “Yet the pressure is internal.”
Meanwhile, Gen Z has taken the blunt OOO route to a new level — coming off both snarky and rude.
In a clip posted on July 16, Joshua Kessel, who goes by @joshfrommarketing on TikTok, shared footage of a video email attachment he sent co-workers with his out-of-office message.
When people message Kessel, they are met with a response telling them to “refer to attached video” for any questions or concerns while he’s away.
“If you’re watching this, I’m probably on a plane to Europe right now. Here are some answers to some frequently asked questions,” he says in the clip.
While some found the video with animations, sound effects, graphics and scenery changes to be “so unserious,” others admired Gen Z’s creativity and humor.
Even companies such as Spotify, Burga, Los Angeles Chargers, Kiehl’s Since 1851 and MCM have all applauded the viral video, calling Kessel a “genius” or saying that he has “main character” energy.
“Adding a bit of creativity and humor here and there is no harm; emails, which leave many workers stressed, are a perfect platform for that,” Movchan said in a press release.
However, management consultant Alison Green advises that too much creativity could end up being a bad thing, depending on who is trying to reach you.
“You never know who might email you while you’re away, so proceed with caution if you’re using humor,” she shared last year with The Cut.
Similarly, if you’re going to set your away response to mention drinking away at the beach, be mindful that it might not land well with someone who doesn’t know you.
Out-of-office messages should be kept simple, she says, and not offer too much personal information, be too complicated or “radiate such obvious delight about not being at work that recipients end up wondering if the sender will ever return.”
Your automated reply should mention that you’re out of the office, when you’ll be back and how reachable you are, if at all. But there’s no need to share why you’re away.
If being quick and simple sounds too boring for you, the Harvard Business Review suggests setting up two different OOO messages: one for internal emails where you can have a little more fun, and one for external senders and clients that is more professional.
