Celebrating Rest and Joy one Away Message At a Time
Setting an away message can be a powerful way to celebrate time off and show the importance of our commitment to rest, joy, and time away from work (all things that are not so celebrated in American work culture). I want to share with you, a few ideas for how your away message can act as another way we can challenge the “norms” of the work worlds we live in. It’s a practice to start to notice the ways in which American work culture pushes each of us to make sure we are (The most) productive and “getting it all done” rather than allowing for a critical part of our success: time away and rest.
When we are at the crossroads of whether to write a generic or more detailed away message, I want to offer you the joy of writing an away message that invites your colleagues into a place of rest or joy along with you.
Here are a few examples of away messages that have been examples of challenging the “away from my desk” and inviting people into my rest or joy.
Thank you for your email. I am out of the office on vacation. I invite you to join me in acts of collective care by intentionally making time for yourselves and when you can, offer time back to colleagues and/or clients. Time away from email communication feels especially important in order to address the ways in which white supremacy is manifesting in our society and directly leading to the continued additional stresses of multiple pandemics and loss of life.
2. “While I’m away from my desk, I’d like to take a moment to encourage you to challenge the status quo. A few of the practices I am focused on personally to do that include:
Allowing emotions to exist, but also meeting those emotional needs instead of ignoring, pushing through
Changing my expectations - doing one less thing than I said I would do. I know this is hard for many of us who always strive for the A. But it’s okay if one less thing (or even more) gets done. Consider it a victory when you are able to leave something not completed
Investigating my own patterns of when I jump into either/or thinking or bad/good categories. When I find myself thinking in extremes or one thing or another I want to gently ask myself, “but why are you making this an either/or? Are there more options? How does reinforcing the bad/good binary allow for white supremacy to continue to exist?”
Raise hard issues to the surface. Don’t let the events happening right now pass by without openly talking about the realities of white supremacy. We have to talk about hard topics and have to create workplaces that can hold spaces for complicated feelings and dialogues.
Seek to understand rather than seeking to be “right”
I hope you’ll join me in diving inward, doing a bit less, and reaching out to take care of friends, family, and colleagues when the need arises.”
While I know this away message goes further than most - I encourage you to start with practicing putting up any away message and then customizing what feels comfortable and appropriate to share (also note you can usually customize away messages for internal and external emails so notice you could say something different to colleagues you work with and current clients and new emails that come in).
While writing this post I told a friend and she shared with me one of her away messages
I am out of the office until April 18th, and I will get back to you as soon as I can after that. I am taking care of myself, I hope you can too.
Estoy de vacaciones hasta el 18 de abril y responderé después de eso conforme sea posible. Me estoy tomando estas vacaciones y cuidar de mí misma. Espero que también puedas hacerlo.
Saludos, Yilen (Co-wrtien by Stacey Lawrence,PhD and Yilen Gómez Maqueo Chew, PhD)
I loved how it’s simple and also in those two sentences encourages colleagues to do the same. I also appreciate that she also puts her message in the two predominant languages of her colleagues.
Looking for more inspiration check out these funny away messages.
I look forward to receiving more away messages with little nuggets of joy, rest, expression, and ultimately challengings notions of needing to be at work and available at all times.
