The Goldilocks theory of out-of-office messages

Many vacation out-of-office emails tell me much more than I wish to know.

A businessman wearing a suit lays on the grass with a laptop over his face — JurgaR / Getty

August 9, 2024, 7:13 PM ET

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Some workers use their vacation out-of-office message to make a big statement about their relationship to their job. But it’s okay to simply say you’ll be away.

First, here are four new stories from The Atlantic:

Keep It Simple

Most people prepare straightforward email auto-replies before they go on vacation. They cover the basics: “I am away until [date]. If you need assistance, please email [colleague]. Thank you.” Yet over the past decade, snarky, awkward, or overly personal variations on the away message have emerged. In 2015, The New York Times reported on the proliferation of verbose auto-responses outlining in poetic terms what the vacationing employee was up to—sometimes using actual poems. And as my colleague Marina Koren noted in 2018, some bold emailers even experiment with the announcement that they will be deleting all new messages upon their return. More recently, some Gen Zers, in particular, have focused on setting firm boundaries with work and are allegedly sending gleeful notes telling people not to contact them.

When people go too far with the vacation OOO message, they tend to go in one of two directions. The first group are the apologizers: those who say they’re sorry and share too much information to justify their absence. They may also leave open the possibility that they might actually respond to you before the date they are supposed to return. As my colleague Charlie Warzel wrote in his Substack newsletter in 2021, such auto-responses are “a vivid reflection of a work culture that valorizes constant productivity and the near-total overlap of work and life” while also failing to set realistic expectations.

The second category is something I have seen only a few times in the wild, though it seems to fuel a cottage industry of viral videos and tabloid coverage: the truly in-your-face OOO email. One example: a TikTok of a sassy OOO email that contained a video message in which an employee informed everyone that he was in Europe and refused to say when he would return. This sort of approach is an extreme outlier—most people wouldn’t be bold enough to do this. It makes for good content but seems to sacrifice professionalism for bravado. Plus, offering too much color in your auto-reply can be risky. The Cut advises, “You never know who might email you while you’re away, so proceed with caution if you’re using humor.” (That is generally a good workplace practice.)

The OOO message lives somewhere between public declaration and private note. It happens within the semi-protected space of an email correspondence, but it is effectively a public communication. Some workers see it as a chance to make a statement about the role of work in their life, or to make art. But when it comes to sending a note informing people that you will not be available, it’s okay to simply say that.

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