Leveraging your out of office vacation responder

What is an out of office message?

An out of office message is an email that is sent automatically by an email account, and it’s typically used for holidays, or for my American readers, vacation periods.

Every new email that lands in the inbox, the out of office message is triggered which is sent immediately to the sender’s inbox. Most email providers have some sort of out of office function, and you can tailor your message accordingly.

Why an out of office message is useful

As a time management expert, I’ve witnessed in my clients the impact that email inboxes can have on our productivity and wellbeing.

An out of office message can help you spend less time in your inbox and can therefore afford you more focussed time for important tasks (or more time to rest and recharge; you choose).

When we spend our days constantly going to and fro, distracted and unfocused, task switching from this to that it really does drain our energy and we can wind up feeling stressed and overwhelmed.

Instead, schedule your email sessions and block these out as reminders in your calendar. Only deal with emails during these specified times (if your job is customer care, and you’re expected to deal promptly with emails… this obviously wouldn’t be a good move for you… so think about your job, how long you need to spend on emails daily and what times of day are critical for you. You might want to spend more time in your inbox on a Monday versus a Wednesday/Thursday - so play around and experiment until you find a routine that works).

Having an out of office message will help set expectations. Here’s how to go about it…

Setting up your out of office message

I use Gmail, and within Gmail there is a ‘vacation responder’ feature that you can use. Head to the settings cog in the top right corner of your Gmail, click See all settings and then scroll down to vacation responder (screenshot below). There will be a way to set-up an out of office with your email provider, hit up Google for instructions.

It’s clearly designed to be switched on for vacations (the clue is in the name!), but I have tended to lean towards having it switched on all the time.

I use this as a way to

set expectations for email response times,
share my working hours, and
point people in the direction of my other resources whilst they wait to hear back from me.

My email auto-responder allows me to unplug a little from my inbox. Instead of having my inbox open all day and letting other people's priorities rule my schedule, I choose to time block my email sessions, normally a couple of times a week, and switch off from email at other times. This allows me to properly focus so that I can accomplish my to-do-list effectively and efficiently.

I’ve seen a handful of solopreneurs and small business owners do similar and so I wanted to share how you can leverage your out of office message so you can get more time.

Might an auto-responder annoy some folks? It probably will… but if that’s the case then I don’t think they’re my type of people!! Gmail is set-up so that if someone sends several messages in short succession, the automated reply will be sent at most once every 4 days. Also, emails sent to your spam folder or addressed to a mailing list you subscribe to don't get your reply.

What to write in your out of office message

Typically what you’d find in an out of office message is a short statement to say, “I’m out of the office”, details on the dates or times you’ll be unavailable, instructions for what to do in your absence e.g. is there someone else to reach out to, and then some kind of sign-off.

However, because I have mine switched on most of the time it allows me to let the recipient know that I’ve received their email, what my usual response times are and my hours of work and I also point people in the direction of some of my other resources that they can tap into whilst they wait for my reply.

It’s a great way to convey my values, share a bit of my personality and also be generous in signposting to some fantastic free resources too. People need multiple touch points now to build ‘like, know and trust’ before they become customers, and so this auto-responder can be another way to facilitate this, and you can also improve traffic to other areas of your business (website, social media and so on) whilst still addressing the sender’s needs.

Creative examples of out of office replies

Here are a couple of examples of creative out of office replies that I’ve received:

Firstly, I love this one from Bev Feldman. Bev is a ‘tech fairy’ that helps business owners with their ConvertKit email marketing; and we happened to meet on a ConvertKit creator happy hour.

The gap that I see in many out-of-office auto-responders is there is no Call To Action. In my opinion, this is a huge missed opportunity. In Bev’s message, she asks the reader to book a call or to join her mailing list.

Bev’s out of office auto-responder is also a reminder to change up your auto-responder with the seasons; this is her reply for August (Pop this as a recurring task into your project management system, mine is Asana).