I don't bother putting Out of Office on for cases where I'm traveling for work for just one day or taking half a day off, because I'll still at least see the email within 24 hours and would be able to respond if it needs an answer quickly -- and if it needs an answer MORE quickly than that, people will call my cell anyway. It's not unusual for me to be trapped in meetings without looking at my mail that long, anyway, so it's not different enough to merit an OOP.
Anything longer than that gets an automatic reply set up, because my role means several dozen people I work with regularly and an even larger random of random occasional people could email me and need something from me within a couple of days. Also, in my group the coverage plans tend to be fairly complicated and this is the best place to put them. When I went for the three week holiday recently, my OOP message was something like: "For program A, coverage is MD, except during week 2, when it's LG. For programs B and C, coverage is BT, except for the last three days, when it's me by cell. For program D, coverage is LG." The thing I really like about the new(ish, I forget when this feature first came in) Outlook is that it pull in and displays the OOP messages as soon as you put the person's email in the "To" line, so I can usually see whether it's worth sending them an email at all, or add their coverage straight away without needing to send a separate forward -- or send those emails that go "I'm just emailing you to get your Out of Office reply because I know you're out but I forgot when you come back. Hope you're having fun! :)"
I also send out a heads up to the people I work with regularly before I take off for a holiday of longer than a week, ideally with about a week's notice, so if there's something they were going to ask me to do, they ask me now, and I can either get it done before the holiday or at least leave my coverage a better passdown. Or give the customers time to accept that it will be a month before the thing gets looked at again :P
Some people at work actually send their vacations as calendared meetings to the people they work with closely / their boss / their coverage (i.e. not just block the time off on their own calendars as an "appointment", but actually send it as a 2-week long meeting to others). I don't do this myself, and I'm torn on whether it's a good practice. On the one hand, it does make it easy to keep track of when that particular person is out and coming back. On the other hand, it clutters up the calendars of the people these "meetings" are sent to, and one can't always tell whether someone's calendra looks blocked all day because THEY are out, or some guy in their group is.
Personal:
No automatic replies, ever. I do still check personal email periodically while on holiday. 95% of stuff I get via personal email does not require a reply at all, and the rest of it definitely does not require any sort of urgent reply. The personal communication that can't wait a couple of days or even weeks has all migrated to texting for me.
Oh, also, I would be concerned about security, because the personal email address is out there on mailing lists and multiple company contracts, and who knows what other information is linked to it. I don't necessarily expect someone to see an automatic reply and come rob my house -- but we had a weird experience last year when a scammer hit our Expedia account just as we left for an international trip (they stole some Expedia points and bought a night in a hotel in Chicago; the whole thing was easy enough to reverse, but took up a morning of holiday travel). The timing might've been a coincidence, but on the other hand, scamming a person while they're traveling is probably awfully convenient, and I'd hate to give them any more advantages.
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Date: 2018-08-10 03:36 pm (UTC)I don't bother putting Out of Office on for cases where I'm traveling for work for just one day or taking half a day off, because I'll still at least see the email within 24 hours and would be able to respond if it needs an answer quickly -- and if it needs an answer MORE quickly than that, people will call my cell anyway. It's not unusual for me to be trapped in meetings without looking at my mail that long, anyway, so it's not different enough to merit an OOP.
Anything longer than that gets an automatic reply set up, because my role means several dozen people I work with regularly and an even larger random of random occasional people could email me and need something from me within a couple of days. Also, in my group the coverage plans tend to be fairly complicated and this is the best place to put them. When I went for the three week holiday recently, my OOP message was something like: "For program A, coverage is MD, except during week 2, when it's LG. For programs B and C, coverage is BT, except for the last three days, when it's me by cell. For program D, coverage is LG." The thing I really like about the new(ish, I forget when this feature first came in) Outlook is that it pull in and displays the OOP messages as soon as you put the person's email in the "To" line, so I can usually see whether it's worth sending them an email at all, or add their coverage straight away without needing to send a separate forward -- or send those emails that go "I'm just emailing you to get your Out of Office reply because I know you're out but I forgot when you come back. Hope you're having fun! :)"
I also send out a heads up to the people I work with regularly before I take off for a holiday of longer than a week, ideally with about a week's notice, so if there's something they were going to ask me to do, they ask me now, and I can either get it done before the holiday or at least leave my coverage a better passdown. Or give the customers time to accept that it will be a month before the thing gets looked at again :P
Some people at work actually send their vacations as calendared meetings to the people they work with closely / their boss / their coverage (i.e. not just block the time off on their own calendars as an "appointment", but actually send it as a 2-week long meeting to others). I don't do this myself, and I'm torn on whether it's a good practice. On the one hand, it does make it easy to keep track of when that particular person is out and coming back. On the other hand, it clutters up the calendars of the people these "meetings" are sent to, and one can't always tell whether someone's calendra looks blocked all day because THEY are out, or some guy in their group is.
Personal:
No automatic replies, ever. I do still check personal email periodically while on holiday. 95% of stuff I get via personal email does not require a reply at all, and the rest of it definitely does not require any sort of urgent reply. The personal communication that can't wait a couple of days or even weeks has all migrated to texting for me.
Oh, also, I would be concerned about security, because the personal email address is out there on mailing lists and multiple company contracts, and who knows what other information is linked to it. I don't necessarily expect someone to see an automatic reply and come rob my house -- but we had a weird experience last year when a scammer hit our Expedia account just as we left for an international trip (they stole some Expedia points and bought a night in a hotel in Chicago; the whole thing was easy enough to reverse, but took up a morning of holiday travel). The timing might've been a coincidence, but on the other hand, scamming a person while they're traveling is probably awfully convenient, and I'd hate to give them any more advantages.