Decoding ‘Out of Office’ messages

…and what they say about the sender

It’s amazing how liberating it is to set an Out of Office message. But just because you don’t have to do it again & again — don’t write a tome.

As the festive season approaches, a nifty little invention — the Automated Out of Office (OOO) message is all set to flood your inbox. But this harmless little bot has turned into something a lot more sinister.

It started off being an expectation management tool. An automated way of telling the other guy to not get his hopes too high. A neat solution, really (for once, you actually responded to every mail and did it asap).

Crafting it then, should’ve been a breeze — right? But wait — did you say everything you wanted to? Are the dates right? Does this sound curt? Would they know who does what in your team? Did you say Hi? Should you suggest that you are contactable in the case of an emergency?

Call me anal(ytical), but it infuriates me to see the amount of irrelevant information that finds it’s way into my inbox via these over-thought OOOs. All I need to know is when are you back and who should I call in your absence. Really.

So this festive season, here is my attempt to lower the e-noise levels which are about to be generated when people sit down and craft their OOOs en-masse. After a careful analysis of more than a 100 OOOs from my inbox — here is a flowchart that breaks down the components that constitute about 90pc of the universe. To make this actionable — I’ve also given every component an Irrelevance Rating (IR), based on whether it adds any useful information to the message or not. So the higher the IR — the more irrelevant that byte is.

So go ahead, draft your festive OOO, sprinkle it with all that you want to say — but before you hit the ‘Apply’ button — take a second and calculate its Irrelevance Sum = Sum(IR). Anything above 10, and it’s not worth the pixels.

The OOFM Decoder

PS: In case you still have a lot of time on your hands and you want to add a bit of yourself to your OOO — be a bit creative. Here is my fantasy OOO — I will someday muster the balls to actually hit ‘Apply’ on this:

Hey There

1. I’m not back until the 12th
2. It’s not as important as you think.