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Vacations are around the corner! In the past, out-of-office meant uncertainty: You had to replan, reschedule, reassign whenever you got email notifications that someone was unavailable.
Google Workspace lets you know who is around before you send. Learn how to set up out-of-office properly and save everyone time.
How to set out-of-office
How to set out-of-office
Calendar has a proper way to do out-of-office: By selecting the "out of office" type when scheduling a new event. It's as simple as that!
This only works in the simple "card" editor in Calendar - click your empty calendar once.
As a bonus, Calendar can "automatically decline meetings" if you want:
"Decline only new meetings": Nothing happens to existing meetings, so this is save. If you get any meeting, Calendar declines for you. You can always accept later.
"Decline new and existing meetings": Clears your schedule (with the message you specified). It's as efficient as it sounds.
That's the way! Going out in style.
Out of office lets others see you're away - before they message you
Out of office lets others see you're away - before they message you
When you set OOO this way, others will know you're away BEFORE they assign you work, ping you, email you. Your status follows you around everywhere in Google Workspace.
The time you save others adds up: Meetings can be rescheduled without waiting for your vacation responder to arrive (or maybe the meeting can happen with someone else). A task can be assigned to someone else. Work flows.
Calendar
Calendar
Marking yourself as OOO helps others schedule.
Chat
Chat
Others will see a banner when they look you up.
Docs, Sheets, Slides...
Docs, Sheets, Slides...
Commenting and tasking people shows who is OOO, letting you pick someone else.
Gmail
Gmail
Others will see you are OOO before they email you. This will result in smarter, less emails.
Bonus
Bonus
People chips and hovercards also show OOO.
Who sees out-of-office?
Who sees out-of-office?
Out-of-office is internal to your company.
Now that you can share your appointment schedule with your clients, the schedule is automatically emptied when you are OOO. No conflicts!
This is NOT out-of-office
This is NOT out-of-office
Gmail's vacation responder is for external people
Gmail's vacation responder is for external people
The vacation responder in Gmail is not linked to OOO. The vacation responder is for outsiders who (for obvious reasons) do not need to know every time we are away.
You have to set it separately. In Gmail, go to Settings > General > Vacation responder.
The vacation responder is not part of OOO.
This is the out-of-office parade. And yes, October 24 is the best day of the year and reason for you all to come party with me in a way that we may need to extend into October 25.
Creating long events
Creating long events
Calendar events are no substitute for out-of-office. They do none of the smart things that keep your team running. Most people have learned to schedule over long events because they don't mean anything.
Calendar does not yet allow third-party apps to create out-of-office events. Stay away from apps and block your calendar with an out-of-office event manually instead. It looks better and your team will thank you for it.
If you're lucky to go on summer vacation (or the 4th of July week), set your out-of-office event today to make sure people know. It's great to be out-of-office, but let's make our colleagues' lives a bit easier by setting it properly. They'll like you all the more when you come back. Thanks for reading!
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#calendarPublished 2019-09-23 by Holger Matthies.Re-published 2021-04-20 by Holger Matthies.Re-published 2022-06-28 by Holger Matthies.Modified 2022-06-28 by Holger Matthies.Written listening to Alexandre Bergheau - Wonderland (about 30x on repeat)
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