What I learned from turning my ‘Out of Office’ auto-replies on for a month
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Re: What I learned from turning my ‘Out of Office’ auto-replies on for a month
#2Hi Doug, I was in your presentation for Super Mondays at Newcastle University yesterday.
Just wanted to say thanks for coming,and congratulations for getting to the front page of HC again, interesting how you mentioned that yesterday and it happened today.
Re: What I learned from turning my ‘Out of Office’ auto-replies on for a month
#3Aarrrrggggggg, out of office replied are the BANE of the internet.
Its an asynchronous medium, like the postal service. Its not a conversation on the telephone. Replies are not expected to be instant. Anybody that calls you up 1 hour later to find out why you've not answered is clearly "doing it wrong"®. Use the correct tool for the job.
The guy could have stopped spamming people and just answered his emails once a month instead for the same effect.
People that claim email is a bind or that they are a slave to it should have it removed and see how they prefer life.
Re: What I learned from turning my ‘Out of Office’ auto-replies on for a month
#4Aarrrrggggggg, out of office replied are the BANE of the internet. Its an asynchronous medium, like the postal service. Its not a conversation on the telephone. Replies are not expected to be instant. Anybody that calls you up 1 hour later to find out why you've not answered is clearly "doing it wrong"®. Use the correct tool for the job. The guy could have stopped spamming people and just answered his emails once a m…
Don't agree at all. Whilst it may be asynchronous, people do have an expectation of a reply within a reasonable time frame - hours to a few days depending on the relationship.
It is _incredibly_ infuriating when people are out for 2 weeks and don't alert you to this fact. You end up wasting time waiting for a repsonse when you culd have immediately sought assistance from an alternative contact.
It's not spam. It's polite and helpful.
Re: What I learned from turning my ‘Out of Office’ auto-replies on for a month
#5Love this!
Basically work email is horrible, do all you can to stop it.
It creates individual silos of knowledge that only people included are party to, whenever someone leaves they take this with them (would you start a job and take on someone else's old mailbox, yuck!)
It drags people into work 24/7, especially in global organisations but also in 9-5 local time type places, yuck!
I've worked hard to get everyone at the start-up I work at to stop sending each other emails and use yammer instead - this has worked remarkably well especially among the techies.
Make your life better and do what you can to stop using email.
Re: What I learned from turning my ‘Out of Office’ auto-replies on for a month
#6Here's my IT version of "Out of Office"
* People will seek you out if they think they need you urgently. It doesn't matter there's a 24 hour help desk available by phone or IM to answer the same question.
* Colleagues will IM you every time they see you online, even if it's 1am and you only signed on because you're on-call and need to fix something urgently.
* Some issues resolve themselves if you don’t answer straight away, but they won't tell you, so you still spend time answering them.
* Email is a chore to many people, so they don't bother to read what you said, even if it helps them out.
Re: What I learned from turning my ‘Out of Office’ auto-replies on for a month
#7Aarrrrggggggg, out of office replied are the BANE of the internet. Its an asynchronous medium, like the postal service. Its not a conversation on the telephone. Replies are not expected to be instant. Anybody that calls you up 1 hour later to find out why you've not answered is clearly "doing it wrong"®. Use the correct tool for the job. The guy could have stopped spamming people and just answered his emails once a m…
eh, the big problem is people on mailing lists. Everyone hates out of office emails in mailing lists.
Vacation messages, when emailing individuals? Yeah, in the technical sphere, they are generally considered kinda rude. In the business sphere, the opposite. So yeah, here on hn, with a foot in both camps, eh, just make sure you don't vacation message a mailing list.
Re: What I learned from turning my ‘Out of Office’ auto-replies on for a month
#8Aarrrrggggggg, out of office replied are the BANE of the internet. Its an asynchronous medium, like the postal service. Its not a conversation on the telephone. Replies are not expected to be instant. Anybody that calls you up 1 hour later to find out why you've not answered is clearly "doing it wrong"®. Use the correct tool for the job. The guy could have stopped spamming people and just answered his emails once a m…
Don't agree at all. Whilst it may be asynchronous, people do have an expectation of a reply within a reasonable time frame - hours to a few days depending on the relationship. It is _incredibly_ infuriating when people are out for 2 weeks and don't alert you to this fact. You end up wasting time waiting for a repsonse when you culd have immediately sought assistance from an alternative contact. It's not spam. It's po…
Which is exactly fundamental to my point and to the article. You have an expectation which you are placing on other. When the author stopped trying to be synchronous with an asynchronous medium he found himself to be more productive and people were OK with that.
It turns out that the frustration you feel is the problem of someone not replying, it is you externalising your problems as other peoples fault. If you really need a response quickly pick up the phone, get a synchronous answer via a synchronous medium.
Re: What I learned from turning my ‘Out of Office’ auto-replies on for a month
#9One of the biggest keys to this experiment is he notes that he will only be checking email at specific times. If you are in a position to do so, this can be one of the very best ways to get your email overload under control.
Love the experiment, and being explicit about this type of social contract would help many of us have better communication patterns.
Re: What I learned from turning my ‘Out of Office’ auto-replies on for a month
#10Aarrrrggggggg, out of office replied are the BANE of the internet. Its an asynchronous medium, like the postal service. Its not a conversation on the telephone. Replies are not expected to be instant. Anybody that calls you up 1 hour later to find out why you've not answered is clearly "doing it wrong"®. Use the correct tool for the job. The guy could have stopped spamming people and just answered his emails once a m…
eh, the big problem is people on mailing lists. Everyone hates out of office emails in mailing lists. Vacation messages, when emailing individuals? Yeah, in the technical sphere, they are generally considered kinda rude. In the business sphere, the opposite. So yeah, here on hn, with a foot in both camps, eh, just make sure you don't vacation message a mailing list.
That's easy to say, but hard to actually do. As much as I hate spamming mailing lists, it's not like I'm going to spend two days carefully specifying answering rules for every autoreply message target in my Outlook that I must use at work. So, the burden of doing that properly is on Microsoft or company IT to make sure who will get the auto reply, while all user can and has to do is to tick a check box and type an actual message.