Going some where for vacation, Isn’t it will be great that you will not have to take load of business, don’t have to check emails. You can delegate your work to your assistant.
Here is some tips which you can follow before going for vacation
-> Make your assistant understand your work. Complete all your pending works
Image Credit: Hongkiat
When you will be in vacation, you don’t want to be disturbed by call for your pending cases, so resolve all your open cases or delegate the case to your assistant/colleague with all details to complete it, respond all open messages with your schedule of vacation in the signature to inform all the colleagues and clients.
-> Set the vacation responder with the information like dates for which you are going out and emergency contact number for urgent cases.
For setting the vacation responder, follow the below steps
- Go to your gmail.
- Click on the gmail setting(Gear icon on the top right)
- In General Tab, you will see Vacation responder column. You can set the date for which out of office message will be replied automatically and write the out of office message with emergency contact details for urgent cases.
- Then clicking on save changes will save the out of office reply for your account.
-> Set the vacation responder for your contacts only
Limit your vacation responder to your contacts only, so when any external users will mail, they will not get your gmail out of office message with your emergency contact details.
-> Set the filter to forward all important mails to your assistant.
If you are expecting some mails related to your work in the vacation period , set up the forwarding those particular messages with gmail filter feature. Briefly, you can set filter which will automatically forward the particular mails after filtering.
So all has been set before you leave for vacation, if you have some extra time then you can test that your out of office messages are working correctly or not with your secondary email address/colleagues address and mails are getting forwarded to your colleagues or not.
It will not seem good if you have returened and your vacation responder is still on, users are getting the out of office reply on every message.So make an event for what to do after returning.
Some Tips on what to do after coming back from Vacation
Hopefully, evenrything was well handled by your assistant/colleague, so after coming back follow the below steps to correct your settings.
-> Remove your vacation schedule from your email signature.
-> Disable the gmail out of office/vacation responder.
-> Remove all vacation related filters.
-> Check out your sent mails oe labels which mails been forwarded or received.
-> Follow up with your colleagues/assistant who handled urgent cases.
Now you can start working again noramlly with your refreshed mood 🙂 .
