Welcome to How I Work, a show about the tactics used by leading innovators to get so much out of their day. I'm your host, doctor Amanda Imba. I'm an organizational psychologist, the CEO of Inventium, and I'm obsessed with finding ways to optimize my work day. Now. Most out of office auto responders are a pretty good remedy for insomnia. They read something along the lines of I'm traveling for work until December fifteenth. During this time, I'll have limited access to email. If you need something urgently, please contact go through it on the administration team. I will respond to this email upon my return. How boring and they are all the same, I think because someone wants to use this format. Around the time of the inception of the auto responder, it somehow became the default and almost no one questioned it. I came to this realization a couple of years ago. I was sitting down to write my own boring out of office message and thought, hang on, literally hundreds of people are going to be reading this. Maybe this is a great opportunity to include something interesting and b bring a smile to people's faces, because, let's face it, out of office messages generally do the opposite on both counts. At around the same time, I was experimenting with different ways of structuring my work date. I've been very influenced by Paul Graham's post about maker versus Manager time, and I had started trying to spend my mornings in maker time and out of my inbox. Given I wasn't planning on checking emails in the morning, I thought i'd create a permanent auto responder so no one would expect an urgent response from me. It read something like, hi there. If you sent this email before lunchtime, I won't have seen it. This is because I'm on a mission to make my mornings more focused and less reactive. I try to spend my mornings in maker time and my afternoons in manager time. If you do need something urgently, please contact my EA, who, unlike me, still checks her emails all day. What was interesting is that the response to my message was instant. Literally every day, people would reply to my auto responders saying how much they loved it and that it made them think about how they structured their day. Sam even said they forwarded it onto their team to read. And of course, the irony of having an auto responder that was generating more emails was not lost on me. But the biggest benefit of the auto responder was that it immediately eliminated any guilt I had about staying out of my inbox. Most office cultures expect instant responses to email. The quicker the response, the more prodactive you're seen to be, which is a little bit crazy because those who are constantly in their inbox are probably not able to carve out much time to make progress on their most important projects. What my out of office reply allowed me to feel is literally zero guilt around taking a little while to reply to a lot of incoming emails. The automatic email people received from me was basically saying to them, lower your expectations of when you'll hear back from me, and you know something. Since making this change, I've received zero complaints about how long I take to reply to emails. And now, in addition to the lack of guilt, seeing the impact my auto responder was having motivated me to constantly change it and keep inserting new and interesting research findings or helpful tips. I began to see my auto responder as a really powerful communication tool that could help more people rethink the way they designed their work date. So at the beginning of every month, I revise my auto responder to include something new. I'm also mindful that there are some people, such as my team, who'll email me almost every day, and I want to try to keep things somewhat fresh. So the next time you go into your email settings to schedule an auto responder, think carefully about what you're writ see if you can include a little gem of knowledge, or at very least try to bring a smile, not a your to the person receiving it. And if you are trying to spend less time on your inbox in twenty nineteen, an auto responder might be just the thing you need to reduce your guilt about being a little slower to hit reply. That is it for today's little mini episode. If you liked it or found it useful, I'd love it if you could share the episode with other people that you know who perhaps could do with improving their auto responders. And as always, if you're enjoying how I work, I would love it if you could write a review. I just love reading any feedback from people listening to this podcast and on what you think. So that is all for today's episode, I will see you next time.

Welcome to How I Work, a show about the tactics used by leading innovators to get so much out of their day. I'm your host, doctor Amanda Imba. I'm an organizational psychologist, the CEO of Inventium, and I'm obsessed with finding ways to optimize my work day. Now. Most out of office auto responders are a pretty good remedy for insomnia. They read something along the lines of I'm traveling for work until December fifteenth. During this time, I'll have limited access to email. If you need something urgently, please contact go through it on the administration team. I will respond to this email upon my return. How boring and they are all the same, I think because someone wants to use this format. Around the time of the inception of the auto responder, it somehow became the default and almost no one questioned it. I came to this realization a couple of years ago. I was sitting down to write my own boring out of office message and thought, hang on, literally hundreds of people are going to be reading this. Maybe this is a great opportunity to include something interesting and b bring a smile to people's faces, because, let's face it, out of office messages generally do the opposite on both counts. At around the same time, I was experimenting with different ways of structuring my work date. I've been very influenced by Paul Graham's post about maker versus Manager time, and I had started trying to spend my mornings in maker time and out of my inbox. Given I wasn't planning on checking emails in the morning, I thought i'd create a permanent auto responder so no one would expect an urgent response from me. It read something like, hi there. If you sent this email before lunchtime, I won't have seen it. This is because I'm on a mission to make my mornings more focused and less reactive. I try to spend my mornings in maker time and my afternoons in manager time. If you do need something urgently, please contact my EA, who, unlike me, still checks her emails all day. What was interesting is that the response to my message was instant. Literally every day, people would reply to my auto responders saying how much they loved it and that it made them think about how they structured their day. Sam even said they forwarded it onto their team to read. And of course, the irony of having an auto responder that was generating more emails was not lost on me. But the biggest benefit of the auto responder was that it immediately eliminated any guilt I had about staying out of my inbox. Most office cultures expect instant responses to email. The quicker the response, the more prodactive you're seen to be, which is a little bit crazy because those who are constantly in their inbox are probably not able to carve out much time to make progress on their most important projects. What my out of office reply allowed me to feel is literally zero guilt around taking a little while to reply to a lot of incoming emails. The automatic email people received from me was basically saying to them, lower your expectations of when you'll hear back from me, and you know something. Since making this change, I've received zero complaints about how long I take to reply to emails. And now, in addition to the lack of guilt, seeing the impact my auto responder was having motivated me to constantly change it and keep inserting new and interesting research findings or helpful tips. I began to see my auto responder as a really powerful communication tool that could help more people rethink the way they designed their work date. So at the beginning of every month, I revise my auto responder to include something new. I'm also mindful that there are some people, such as my team, who'll email me almost every day, and I want to try to keep things somewhat fresh. So the next time you go into your email settings to schedule an auto responder, think carefully about what you're writ see if you can include a little gem of knowledge, or at very least try to bring a smile, not a your to the person receiving it. And if you are trying to spend less time on your inbox in twenty nineteen, an auto responder might be just the thing you need to reduce your guilt about being a little slower to hit reply. That is it for today's little mini episode. If you liked it or found it useful, I'd love it if you could share the episode with other people that you know who perhaps could do with improving their auto responders. And as always, if you're enjoying how I work, I would love it if you could write a review. I just love reading any feedback from people listening to this podcast and on what you think. So that is all for today's episode, I will see you next time.