The Best OOO Messages

The pandemic continues on and working from home is going strong as a normative work arrangement. This shift is overwhelmingly and deservedly popular with workers and is likely here to stay for many good reasons, but it can pose certain challenges when it comes to drawing boundaries between work and home life.

While this is important to manage no matter what kind of environment you work in, it's an especially important issue to tackle explicitly when the lines between your workplace and your home aren't physically distinct. If you don't, co-workers and managers may not respect or be aware of the start and end of your workday, workweek, or vacation times, and might even begin to treat you like you're “at work” 24/7, leading to unhealthy frustration and burnout.

In France, lawmakers responded to this issue in 2017 by enshrining the right to disconnect into law, making it against the rules for employers to email employees outside of work hours. But short of such protections, employees are left to communicate boundaries on a more individual basis. This can be tricky as workers attempt to balance the need to turn off with concerns over appearing uncommitted or rude.

One popular way to address this is with an out-of-office message (also known as an OOO message). These can be a great tool to help fight burnout. Their automatic nature allows you to communicate boundaries in a way that's consistent and unlikely to be taken personally, and their immediacy keeps others informed in a timely manner.

Humor can be a particularly useful ingredient, taking a bit of the edge off of the assertiveness needed to reclaim one's own time and showing that it's done with only friendly intent.

Need a good OOO LOL? Whether they apply to traveling for a vacation or turning off from work from within the home, here are a few of our favorite examples of funny out-of-office messages from around the web.