Social Software
Dont let people 'mine' your Out of Office message data
- Details
- Category: Collaboration
- Published Date
- Written by angusf
- Hits: 738
One of my colleagues used to have 'I am out of the office and your email will be automatically deleted and forgotten' as his OOO message. Extreme? Maybe, but accurate and realistic.
I dont like OOO messages much but they are at least useful for telling people why you are unable to reply and what to do about it. But you dont want to let them be a little door into your private information so heres a way to avoid that.
My OOO says
' I will be out of the office until dd/mm/yy. Please refer to your other contacts in the organisation. Please feel free to send me a text message if its urgent. I will respond to this message, as required, on my return.'
What this does is: -
- Give a return date,
- Divert time critical real issues to other people in the team
- Leaves a way for the boss to get hold of me by text and neatly reminds people Im not reading my email while at the same time dissuading people from bugging me unless its really important.
- Avoids scammers/spammers by not giving my number or the names of other people out and
- Set an expectation that I might not reply due to the passage of time I find this to be very effective.
So I can feel free to ignore issues that the passing of time resolved while I was away, and I can say 'I was contactable' there were clear instructions on my OOO if it was important.
Its my experience that people dont bug you by text unless its quite important.
Be careful with your OOO message
Unexpected things can happen
It reads "I am not in the office at the moment. Send any work to be translated".