What I learned from turning my ‘Out of Office’ auto-replies on for a month

http://dougbelshaw.com/blog/2013/10/01/what-i-learned-from-turning-my-out-of-office-auto-replies-on-for-a-month/

by dajbelshaw • 13 years ago

27 49 13 years ago

gambiting• 13 years ago

Hi 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.

dajbelshaw4• 13 years ago

Thanks! It's all to do with getting to know the system. Popular HN threads have a certain logic to way people format link titles. ;-)

nextw33k2• 13 years ago

Aarrrrggggggg, 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.

retube• 13 years ago

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.

nextw33k2• 13 years ago

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.

masklinn• 13 years ago

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.

Not at all, unless frequent contacts are expected in which case you should be warned through other channels.

You end up wasting time waiting for a repsonse when you culd have immediately sought assistance from an alternative contact.

If you need fast turnaround, use a fast turnaround transport. That's what instant messengers or phones are for.

It's not spam. It's polite and helpful.

I completely disagree, especially when the numbskull using out-of-office replies can't be arsed to turn it off for mailing lists. It's spammy, impolite and unhelpful.

VLM4• 13 years ago

"It is _incredibly_ infuriating when people are out for 2 weeks and don't alert you to this fact."

Email is a great "electronic mail" system but a miserable trouble ticketing system. None the less, just like "Excel" is the corporate standard database system, in practice email is the corporate standard ticketing system. Of course it doesn't work very well, but incorrect application of the tool, is not the fault of the tool.

dhimes• 13 years ago

The problem is using a binary vocabulary to describe something that should be on a spectrum. Just because I use an asynchronous medium doesn't mean that I don't expect a reply in a "reasonable" time, and "reasonableness" will depend on the situation and hopefully both parties are in some agreement.

Think of an asynchronous ajax call. It may be ok to wait 5 seconds, but not 5 days.

I find far more intrusive the phone call that could have been taken care of via email. I deal with this because a community service group I work with has a lot of elder people. They like to call. Yes, I understand it's Tuesday, and we have a meeting Friday, but I can answer you in two hours (by email). Don't interrupt me right now (by calling). But it can't wait two weeks.

lsc• 13 years ago

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.

levosmetalo• 13 years ago

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.

opminion• 13 years ago

How do you want to deal with asynchronous tasks which have to be dealt with within the day?

Synchronous communication is not a solution for that when interruptions are undesirable.

TeddyLondon3• 13 years ago

Love 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.

lepton• 13 years ago

I'm really surprised at this attitude. What is fundamentally wrong with email, that I should do what I can to stop using it?

I prefer written communication since I find it more deliberate, and therefore more productive ultimately (more thought goes into writing than into a phone conversation; the pace is slower). Email lets me keep my written communication all in one place.

I can see how it would create silos; I try to be liberal in cc'ing others to avoid this and to be inclusive.

I don't understand how email drags people in to work in off-hours. I don't typically expect people to have access to work email off-hours, although I realize many do (myself included). For urgent questions yes, I'll pick up the phone.

To be clear, I get 100+ emails on a typical business day. I'm sure if you get a lot more, a different strategy might be necessary to manage them all.

TeddyLondon3• 13 years ago

I'll add to why I think it is so bad, there is so god damn much of it!

I am not trying to convert anyone but I would hate to get 100+ emails a day, how do you get anything else done?

Since Monday morning (all of Monday and 3/4 of Tuesday) I have had 21 emails, mostly I have been cc'd by customers and they are irrelevant for me.

For the out of work hours thing I have had a lot of emails out of hours and felt that I had to reply - I do accept that if I turn off emails out of work then I'm less likely to be dragged in out of work and maybe other people can read stuff and put it to the back of their minds or just ignore!

I really felt it liberating to stop receiving so much email, I highly recommend it!

tomjen32• 13 years ago

IM is worse.

Frankly though, deal with it - because a phone call is even worse (if you have phones in the office anymore, I don't think I have).

bnegreve• 13 years ago

What do you use instead?

caw• 13 years ago

Here'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.

ljoshua• 13 years ago

One 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.

scottmagdalein• 13 years ago

"some issues resolve themselves" is not true. What you really mean is, "someone else resolved the issue."

zorbo• 13 years ago

There are plenty of problems that go away by themselves because there was no problem to begin with. The micro-managing managers that suddenly get a bright insight that needs to happen now, only to completely forget about it a day later. The impatient people who can't wait 5 minutes before the annual reports are generated and sent out to their inboxes. There are plenty of solutions out there just looking for a problem that doesn't need to solved.

InTheSwiss2• 13 years ago

Yes and no. Some issues are people being a little overly keen and just allowing a little time allows for things to naturally resolve themselves.

minikites• 13 years ago

Sounds like you've never worked a computer help desk. Lots of times people would call in and the problem would stop as soon as they got halfway through explaining it. They just weren't patient enough.

Sometimes people would call in and through the process of describing the issue they would figure out exactly what they needed to do, they just needed to talk it out.

I think this is true for lots of things.

a3_nm• 13 years ago

That's a known effect, the keyword is "rubber duck debugging" <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rubber_duck_debugging>.

SeanDav• 13 years ago

The operative word is "some". The OP was not implying that "All" problems resolve themselves, surely you must have experienced something that you thought was a problem only to discover a bit later that it was not?

VLM4• 13 years ago

Operational issues often self-resolve.

System down for an hour to convert data while XYZ software was shut off to upgrade from 1.2.3 to 2.3.4 last week while you were not answering email? Solution, don't upgrade XYZ software from 1.2.3 to 2.3.4 again, seems simple enough.

Also in the real world random end users are free to request absolutely any imaginable feature or capability which management via budgets or goals have already declared will not be done. So waiting for some higher up to deliver the bad news when you can't deliver the bad news, is perfectly valid assuming you have a reasonable excuse. Oh you'd like it quadruple redundant as long as that redundancy is free? Yes I'd like that too, but it isn't happening.

evilduck• 13 years ago

I can't count how many tickets I've closed by saying "This is lower priority than X, Y and Z. We will address it, but not this very second." Then, two weeks later, going over to the person to gather more information about the ticket, it's suddenly not required any more.

colanderman• 13 years ago

I disagree. I've seen plenty of "bugs" resolve themselves as the reporters realize they just typed something wrong.

gadders• 13 years ago

Looks like he's turned them on for his website as well...

hawkharris• 13 years ago

My understanding is that all communications on Twitter are public and that users are forced to condense all of their comments into 140 characters.

Don't these limitations make it a dangerous medium for discussing detailed and / or sensitive project-related issues?

EDIT: I guess there are direct messages, but I'm not sure how often they're used because I don't use Twitter.

InTheSwiss2• 13 years ago

When I am in crunch I always enable my OoO with a polite message explaining I am in crunch and that I cannot respond to them immediately but will do within the next few days. I also have a dedicated mobile number which I include (which is different to my regular mobile) when I have for people to contact me in there is a real emergency that only I can resolve. Nobody has ever called it :)

dorfsmay2• 13 years ago

Paul Graham once said email is a To Do list that anybody can fill up. Made me look at email differently...

zamalek2• 13 years ago

I while back I set up a rule on my mail server that would effectively OOF respond if people in my company if they didn't CC my manager (indicating that you should CC my manager so that he can triage whatever issue you may need me for). People started coming to me with real issues (instead of the "reflex ask the senior engineer") with valuable evidence (logs, etc.) - they not only needed to convince me to use my time on their work, but my manager as well. Some even found their answers on Google (I was in complete shock). That extra barrier (my manager) was an excellent deterrent for people pawning their work off on to me.

I have since turned it off, but people remain a lot more respectful of my time (I may now be perceived as a dick because of it).

archon• 13 years ago

Unfortunately this requires having a good manager who is willing to take some heat for you. In my experience, managers view their reports as being there to cover for them, not the other way around.

tomjen32• 13 years ago

I wonder how much real information you missed that way.

Also WTF for being on IRC but not email.

dajbelshaw4• 13 years ago

They're fundamentally different forms of communication suited for different purposes?

spongle2• 13 years ago

You are probably perceived as a dick, as am I these days but it doesn't mean you are wrong. This is an unfortunate side effect of office politics and double-standards.

My particular perception switcher was when people started starting side conversations by forwarding JIRA ticket email notifications to me with comments etc and emails with ticket references in asking questions.

I rejected these with a simple filter [A-Z]{1,3}-[0-9]{1,6} with "write it on the damn ticket, peon" (in slightly friendlier language).

Everything turns up on tickets now and I get 4-5 emails a day compared to 80-100.

zamalek2• 13 years ago

You are probably perceived as a dick

While having a good relationship with your coworkers is an important part of being an employee; I am here to do my work. So if "I am a dick who gets stuff done" so be it :) .

tocomment• 13 years ago

It's funny he thinks Twitter isn't asynchronous? Is he really getting more work done if he's checking twitter every five minutes?

dajbelshaw4• 13 years ago

Twitter's a constant stream I dip in and out of. DM's, IRC and Skype chat pings are for important stuff.

Works well. :-)

What I learned from turning my ‘Out of Office’ auto-replies on for a month

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