I took a look at the Email category and realized I’ve been a little slack in updating it =p. To freshen it up a bit, I’ve written a new article on one problem we all face: Should you answer your email on vacation?

Raise your hand if you use your Out Of Office assistant when you go on vacation (I hope your hand is raised). Now, keep it raised if you also check your email while you’re on vacation (probably a good majority of you still have your hand raised). Here’s the big question: Keep your hand raised if you respond to email while on vacation. Hand still raised? Half raised? This is a dilemma that many people face when on vacation: Should you respond to your email? There’s no simple answer for this, but there are many things to consider when making this decision.

To start, sometimes you don’t have a choice. If it’s something urgent, and you don’t see anybody else taking the lead on it, you may have to send out an email. Hopefully, you’ve left a contact person who is competent enough to take care of this for you. However, if a decision needs to be made and you’re the only one to do it, even the most competent person in the world won’t be able to make it for you. On the flip side, if you don’t have access to your email, then obviously you won’t be responding to anything.

Most of the time, you won’t run into either of the above situations. You should have a choice whether to answer it or not. In my opinion, if you take the time to leave a good person as your contact person, you shouldn’t have to answer it. This is my preferred path when on vacation for the following main reason: Everybody knows you’re out of the office (hopefully you’ve communicated this to all your clients as well), so they should not be expecting back an answer from you. By answering, you open yourself up to the possibility of having to work for the rest of your vacation as people know you are checking your email. Obviously, this defeats the purpose of your vacation.

The most important piece of advice I can give here is to leave someone competent in your place. This will solve the problem 95% of the time. For that last 5%, you are probably going to have to do something about the situation. However, one way to mitigate the impact of your vacation is to funnel your answers through your contact people. Call them up and explain what needs to be done. If they can handle it, then all you might have to do is monitor the situation instead of having to get directly involved. Another way to lessen the impact could be to suck it up and solve the problem immediately. Call whoever needs to be called, spend all the time to solve the problem in one shot instead of stringing it along. This way, maybe only one day is devoted to work instead of everyday.

Overall, try to enjoy your vacations as much as possible. If you have to put any work in, try to do it in such a way that the amount of time you need to spend working is minimized. Also, the better qualified your contact person is, the less likely it is that you will have to step in and solve a problem.

One new Tip of the Day and a new article for you, see below:

• See the latest article on Using the Out of Office Assistant for a great way to keep your vacations worry free.
• Today’s Tip of the Day focuses on the importance of Bringing your Business Cards with you everywhere you go.

With the prominence of email in the workplace today as a major means of communication, more and more important correspondence is sent strictly through email. What does this mean? This means that an email that sits in your inbox for two days because you are on vacation could potentially have disastrous consequences. This is why the Out of Office Assistant is more important than ever.

*Note: For this article, I will be dealing with the Out of Office Assistant in Microsoft Outlook 2003. If you don’t use Microsoft Outlook for your email, you should investigate what a similar function would be on your email client.

The Out of Office Assistant works very much like an Away Message in AOL Instant Messenger (IM) if you are familiar with that tool. Basically, you write a few lines of text that is automatically sent to anybody who emails you.

There is a very simple process to do this. First, go to Tools - Out of Office Assistant…. The following pop-up window should be displayed:

As shown above, there are two radio buttons at the top of the window. This toggles the Out of Office Assistant on and off. Important note: Make sure to turn this OFF when you are back in the office. You don’t want to leave this on for a week after you get back.

The “AutoReply” text box is where you type the message you want sent to people when they send you email. In the above screenshot, I have a basic message that I use and modify for each time I’m going to be away from the office. The critical pieces of information you need to provide in this message are the following:

1. The date range for which you will not be in the office.
2. The person to contact in your absence.
3. The subject matter that this contact person can answer questions on.

You should have more than one contact person if you need multiple people to cover multiple different subjects while you are away.

Once this message is crafted, all you have to do is click the “OK” button and your Out of Office Assistant will be turned on. You can also perform more complex functions using the “Add Rule…” button, where you can add rules for when you are away. This works just like creating normal rules in Microsoft Outlook. I don’t use this functionality, but it might come in handy if, for instance, you want all messages from a certain person to be auto-forwarded to one of your contacts.

The Out Of Office Assistant is an extremely valuable tool that you should make sure to take advantage of. Don’t get in trouble because an important email rotted in your inbox while you were at the beach; Take the time to turn on the Out of Office Assistant.