Having 200+ unread e-mails coming back from a vacation is the worst! I want to think of an alternate way(s) of using my Office Assistant, yea, you Microsoft Office “Assistant”, to reduce the burden next go around. I want to be polite and put the responsibility back on the person asking.
1.) Respectfully reply with: “Hey, I am gone for a week on vacation. Can you, respectfully/please/for the love of god, get back with me on or after XYZ date on any requests?”
2.) Turn off e-mail entirely and send them back a note stating that t-roy@work.com has turned off e-mail notifications. If this requires immediate assistance, then e-mail boss@work.com. T-roy will be back on XYZ date. That is when you can re-ask your message
Obviously, e-mails should be important enough to get through. But I don’t think this is an available option.
What else can I (we) do to combat the dreaded day-I-get-back-to-work 400 unread e-mail dumpster pile?
i get work email on my personal phone, so even if on vacation i will delete junk and answer quick questions. Still takes a half day to clean up if off a week
I always set my message to say,
“Lucy is out of the office with limited Internet access until (date i plan to return). If you need a reply before then, please contact Lucy’s-boss@company.com, or call him at 123-456-7890.”
Sometimes it would be my subordinate or coworker on the hook, depending on who was going to be around and what types of emergencies might arise.
It still took me much of a day to dig out, but i rarely had anything urgent, so i could do it at my leisure.
Same, I will often spend like 20 minutes every day or every other day on vacation cleaning it up and answering anything that takes <2 minutes.
The other big thing for me is Slack, I get way more messages there than email. And if I have it set to ‘vacationing’ then my messages/day goes down like 80%. And often those who do send me a message it preface it with NOT URGENT, REPLY WHEN YOU’RE BACK.
In all seriousness, I am pretty religious about using Outlook’s “Rules” function. With careful practice, I’ve got a set of rules in place that do a decent job of whittling down my inbox, and putting less-important things in other folders.
The current version of “real Outlook” in Microsoft 365 is also pretty good about warning about recipients being out of office, and suggesting delayed delivery, when the recipients are in the company.
Also, I’m finding most urgent/rush requests coming via Teams messaging now, rather than email.
I probably only look at my email once a day now…but that’s a little distorted because most of the people I interact with these days are 5-9½ time zones away from me. I check email over breakfast, and get on with my day.
For the “out of office” aspect, however… I work on “self-managed time”, working around my wife and I having a lot of medical appointments. Effectively, that means that I mostly don’t have extended periods unplugged. So, I end up pruning my inbox / responding to Teams messages that need a response even when I’m “out”, although I do usually leave an OOM indicating that if they need me NOW they should call me at [phone numbers].
We’ll see what happens if I am able to take the vacation I have planned this summer.
(I did theoretically have my first real vacation in a long time the fall before last. But my wife and I spent that vacation mostly out of commission due to a stomach bug, so I plugged back in as a distraction from that unpleasantness.)
To be serious for a couple minutes, though - theoretically, you could
create an automatic rule deleting all mail received between your start and end vacation dates (probably configured to not delete meeting invites)
have an out of office message saying something like:
"Please do not email this inbox between X date and Y date. This inbox will not be monitored during this time and emails will not be received/read. " and maybe add cellphone info if you want to provide something for urgent messages.
However, your boss might look askance at doing this kind of thing.
*Edit: maybe a more workable solution would be to have an exclusion to the rule for emails with the word “urgent” in the subject, and asking people to add “urgent” to the title if they want you to see it in your out-of-office message. I still think you might make some managers unhappy if you do this.
This weekend I encountered an out of office message that read “I am on sabbatical until [this coming summer]. Please do not send me mail as I will not see it.”
(My former boss. He got a major project he had been shepherding for 10 years wrapped up to be handed off, and decided to take advantage of the company’s sabbatical policy to spend a year with his kid, sailing around North America, before taking on a new challenge.)
Don’t you have email chains though that you’d want to be cc’d on? Or are you completely okay being uninformed.
If I got a message like in the OP, there would be a significant risk I would decide only to email you if I needed something from you, and not email you to keep you informed of stuff that I’d already sent out to everyone else. (Or not decide, but just not remember.) Basically to remember to inform you on stuff where I don’t need something from you, I would need to keep a running list of stuff to tell you, as would all your coworkers.
I guess I could also save all my emails to you as drafts timed to be sent to you at 9 am when you get in, but that defeats your point.
Another thing you could do is block off the first day you get back to have no meetings and just spend the day going through the emails
If the underlying problem is that people email you too much
You can start writing stuff like
-Person X can represent me on this, please let them know your questions as I’ll be out for a while and may not see your emails in time (assuming you won’t have a hard disagree with Person X when you get back )
-I’m comfortable with you deciding where to go on XYZ project, just let me know when you’re done (assuming you won’t tell them at the conclusion of the project that they’ve been doing it all wrong)
-Hi, I no longer need to be on this email chain
I’m not that great with this stuff but I’m sure others will know how to phrase it even better.
etc
Email chains where I’m cc’d because it’s background information that is potentially relevant to me would probably be sent regardless of my out-of-office message. I’ll let Outlook thread such messages, and with luck I can focus on just the last couple.
For me, the OOM is a way to alert people sending me email (or trying to reach me intraoffice in Teams) that I may not be reading messages in a timely manner, to give them a heads up on how long it might be before I can respond, and to leave instructions on what they should do if they need a faster response.
The details will vary depending on the situation and local culture.
Yeah, it’s about setting expectations for a reply.
Just bulk deleting stuff doesn’t work, because i probably want to get that email from HR sent to the whole company about the new policy i need to know.
But most of the “keeping up on projects” will be sorted into threads, and reading it all at once will be somewhat efficient. And i really did get less email when i had an out of office message.
The subject line sort helps me manage e-mails I can immediately clean up. Another thing you can do is click the “clean up” button. That’d get rid of the older versions of the same subject line (I think)
At my company’s implementation of Office, when you set an out of office message, a little “this person is out of office and may not respond” message appears just above the text input box in the chat window.
The out of office message setting is common between Outlook and Teams.
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