Unconventional Uses of the Email Autoresponder
We’re all familiar with the ubiquitous out-of-office message, an automatic response that lets people know we’re currently unavailable to answer emails. However, the functionality of email autoresponders extends far beyond the confines of vacation alerts.
1. Blocking focus time
Some key duties at work require investing long hours during which we might not be fully responsive to email. Some examples are: performance management weeks, yearly planning events, attending a work offsite, … It is a good idea to enable the email autoresponder in these cases to flag your longer than expected reaction time.
2. Onboarding a new role
When starting a new role in a company, the priority is to get to know what the job is about, what the expectations are, meeting coworkers and stakeholders, reading a bunch, … In order to guarantee that you are able to invest the right amount of time onboarding, setting the autoresponder mentioning that you are learning is something to consider doing.
3. Offboarding the company
This nice hack was seen being used during the recent FAANG layoffs this year, as there is a good chance that, while someone will immediately lose access to their email, the account will remain active for some extra time (and benefit from having the autoresponder being active to send a polite message providing details how to reach out moving forward).
Conclusion
We hope that we gave you some new inspiration on how and when to use the autoresponder. Just remember that you can automatically enable it using AutoOOO.