In our recent survey, “Email” again reined supreme as the Top Time Killer. With Summer wrapping up, many of us are getting in our final vacations, which means we may have a scary amount of emails awaiting our return.
While most vacationing email recipients keep it simple (listing the contact information of their next-in-command and making a vague promise to get back to you by a certain date), some cannot resist the opportunity to inject a bit of their personality into their correspondents’ inboxes in absentia (with humor, poetry or even auto-biographical detail on why they are away).
If you are less inclined to be creative and more of an objector to the trend of being “out of office” but not really, there are also brave souls forging forward with out-of-offices that tell it like it is.
Correspondents who tried emailing The Toast editor and Texts From Jane Eyre author Mallory Ortberg in July received an email with the subject line “nope.” “I am currently on vacation and not accepting any emails about anything. I’m not planning on reading any old emails when I get back, either, because that feels antithetical to the vacation experience.”
“I really did delete all those emails when I got back,” Ms. Ortberg said. You can prioritize the emails and respond to the ones at the top of the list and not at all to those at the bottom of the list. They did, of course, receive notice that you weren’t going to be available.