Holidays and Email Autoreplies

The main holidays in Australia for most people are the Christmas ones. School is closed, people are at the beach and things get very quiet for much of January. This is when I take most of my annual leave, and because I work at a university that closes from just before Christmas until after New Year's day anyway, I can often take up to five weeks off.

It's been my pattern since 2004 to leave my laptop at work and not respond to email for that entire period. This allows me to actually relax, slow down, and prepare for the year to come.

Of course, for that period of time away, I also need to set an out-of-office email autoreply. By that stage of the year, I am usually feeling a little crazed (and thus more 'creative') and this is reflected in the message text.

Here is the archive of my holiday auto-replies to date (the year is the year of the Christmas in question):

Last modified:Saturday, 30-Jan-2010 03:39:26 MST