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Thanks for your email: Why you need to shake-up your out-of-office message immediately

By Administrator | 18 December 2018

Most ‘out-of-office’ auto-responders are a good remedy for insomnia. They read something along the lines of:

‘I am travelling for work until December 15. During this time, I will have limited access to email. If you need something urgently, please contact Gertrude on the administration team. I will respond to this email upon my return.’

Yawn. They are all the same.

I think because someone once used this format at the time of the inception of the auto-responder, it became the default. And almost nobody questioned it.

I came to this realisation a couple of years ago. I was writing my own boring out-of-office message and thought, hang on, literally hundreds of people are going to be reading this. Maybe this is a great opportunity to include something interesting and bring a smile to people’s faces. Because let’s face it, out-of-office messages generally do the opposite on both counts.

At about the same time, I was experimenting with different ways of structuring my workday. I had been influenced by Paul Graham’s post about ‘maker’ versus ‘manager’ time and had started trying to spend my mornings in maker time and out of my inbox. Read more

Amantha Imber - Smart Company - 17 Dec 2018

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