Employees are ditching polite out-of-office messages in favor of direct responses — and keeping them when they return

There’s no better feeling than writing an out of office message before you leave for vacation.

Until you keep getting countless “urgent” emails that aren’t actually urgent.

Employees are exhausted and want to take advantage of their breaks when they get them. To get the message across, more and more people are ditching polite out-of-work emails and leaving more direct automated replies.

Peter Harrison, a 29-year-old interior designer from Portland, Oregon, explains in his automated response that he is “on paid leave” and will not check his email — and encourages the sender to do the same, the Wall Street Journal reported.

“In doing so, you will help foster a workplace that puts people first, respects paid time off, promotes balance and dismantles the culture of always-on connection,” the email states bluntly.

Harrison told the outlet that he used to leave standard out-of-office replies, but was increasingly overwhelmed by the influx of messages he was still receiving.

“We live in a culture where anyone can steal our time and energy,” he said. “This email suggests that maybe we can all do better.”

Barry Ritholtz, 62, chairman and chief investment officer of Ritholtz Wealth Management, is equally direct in his automated response: “I’m traveling and having a lot more fun than I am communicating with you,” his response reads, according to the Wall Street Journal. “I’ll probably forget to email you back.”

“During this time, I will be out of the office, not checking email, avoiding text messages, ignoring Slack, letting calls go to voicemail, being off the grid, and generally unreachable. As such, my autoresponder is, well, an autoresponder,” he wrote later in the email, adding that if it truly is an emergency, they can contact Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell, Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen, and the People’s Bank of China.

“There’s a misconception that if you send someone an email, you’re entitled to an immediate response,” he said. “This message is asking you to slow down. Why do you need this now?”

A 2023 Harvard Business Review article echoed that an OOO response should set boundaries, noting that “if someone’s message is really that important, they will follow through.”

Daniel Sieberg, author of “The Digital Diet,” also encouraged people to write in their email that they won’t read or respond to anything while they’re away and to follow up after they return if it’s important.

Bing Chen, a former YouTube executive who now runs an investment firm and a nonprofit, cautions that you shouldn’t promise any kind of response in your message, especially when you know you won’t have time to respond, he told the WSJ.

Chen’s out-of-office message, “If it’s urgent, take a deep breath, because few things are truly urgent,” has already gone viral on social media. It’s a tribute to his late father, who died young.

“It’s a reminder to focus on what’s really important,” he added.

Besides being simple with OOO messages, people leave them on even after they return to give themselves time to catch up without added stress.

When Katie Gold, 32, an assistant professor who runs a research lab at Cornell University, returned from maternity leave, she changed her auto-reply to say that she had “recently” returned and was “catching up on a lot of work,” and then thanked the sender for their patience with the delayed responses.

She plans to keep this answer until her baby is 1 year old.

“I’m getting swamped with emails from people who all want something from me,” Gold told the Journal. “The answering machine at least gives me peace of mind by ignoring people. They got a response.”

Research shows that the number of emails sent and received globally each day has increased by 34% since 2017 — and that doesn’t even include incoming messages from other platforms, like Slack or Teams.

According to Nadya Movchan, personal branding expert and founder of communications and growth agency Movchan Agency, 86% of people continue to receive unsolicited emails while on vacation.

And the person receiving an email always faces a heavier workload than the person sending it, making the cost-benefit ratio extremely unbalanced, Gloria Mark, professor emerita in the computer science department at the University of California, Irvine, told the WSJ.

“The sender benefits from email because they’re asking for something,” says Mark, who studies how people interact with technology in their daily lives. “The recipient, very often, has to do the work.”

Fortunately, research shows that email recipients tend to overestimate how quickly senders expect a response, so there’s no need to worry if it takes a while to respond to an email.

“I feel like every email is a fake emergency,” Erica Dhawan, a St. Petersburg, Fla.-based strategy consultant and author of a book on digital communications, told the WSJ. “Yet the pressure is internal.”

Meanwhile, Gen Z has taken the direct route of OOO to a new level, being both sarcastic and rude.

In a clip posted on July 16, Joshua Kessel, known as @joshfrommarketing on TikTok, shared footage of an attachment from a video email he sent to coworkers along with his out-of-office message.

When people message Kessel, they receive a response telling them to “refer to the attached video” for any questions or concerns while he is away.

“If you’re watching this, I’m probably on a plane to Europe right now. Here are some answers to some frequently asked questions,” he says in the clip.

While some found the video with its animations, sound effects, graphics and scenery changes “so unserious,” others admired Gen Z’s creativity and humor.

Even companies like Spotify, Burga, Los Angeles Chargers, Kiehl’s Since 1851 and MCM have all applauded the viral video, calling Kessel a “genius” or saying he has the energy of a “main character.”

“It doesn’t hurt to add a little creativity and humor here and there; email, which stresses out many workers, is a perfect platform for this,” Movchan said in a press release.

However, management consultant Alison Green warns that too much creativity could backfire, depending on who is trying to contact you.

“You never know who might email you while you’re away, so be careful about using humor,” she told The Cut last year.

Likewise, if you’re planning on using your response to mention that you were drinking at the beach, be aware that it might not go over well with someone who doesn’t know you.

Out-of-office messages should be kept simple, she says, and not contain too much personal information, be overly complicated or “exude such obvious joy at not being at work that recipients end up wondering if the sender will ever return.”

Your auto-reply should mention that you are out of the office, when you will be back, and how reachable you are, if at all. But there is no need to share Why you are absent.

If being quick and simple seems too boring, Harvard Business Review suggests setting up two different OOO messages: one for internal emails where you can have a little more fun, and one for external senders and clients that’s more professional.