It’s summer-holiday season – which means it’s out-of-office (OOO) email season. Chances are your inbox is already filling up with messages from people who are away from their desk and will be checking their emails only intermittently. Which is obviously a complete lie, since most of us are hopelessly addicted to our devices and have forgotten how to separate work and life. According to one survey, 64% of British workers read and send emails during their vacations.
In a world where we are always on our phones, has the OOO message become redundant? Tyler Brûlé, the editor-in-chief of Monocle, thinks so. In a 2018 op-ed for the Financial Times, Brûlé argued that people who send such messages are “out of step with the ways of the modern working world” and probably have a “fondness for wearing sweatpants”. Sounds like working at Monocle is a blast!
If, like me, you happen to be fond of sweatpants and uninterrupted holidays, then crafting an effective OOO email is an important step in getting people to leave you alone. There are various strategies for doing this; one of them is lying. You can always pretend, for example, that you are holidaying in Green Bank, a community in West Virginia where there is no wifi or mobile-phone service. If this seems a little unethical then I suggest the Distraction Method. I came across this genius strategy on twitter, when someone shared their co-worker’s OOO message: “While I’m away, you can browse Wikipedia’s list of inventors killed by their own inventions.” I can practically guarantee that the recipient of this autoresponse will spend the next 20 minutes obsessing over Franz Reichelt, a tailor who died when he jumped off the Eiffel Tower while testing the “coat parachute” and forget about contacting you altogether.
