How do you nicely say, "I'm not responding to your email...probably ever."!?!
Tl;dr: There isn't much guidance for academic sabbatical auto-replies.
As I mentioned last week, the land of academic sabbatical applications and planning seems shrouded in mists.
In particular, it’s difficult to find any guidance on how to tell other people you’re on sabbatical, and that the reality of sabbaticals is that you’re really supposed to focus on the scholarly work you proposed in your application. (Meaning, no service, no teaching, etc., etc.).
The problem is there is not even a tacit etiquette to follow on this front.
I spent a considerable while looking online, and I found no useful discussions of what an out-of-office email auto-reply message should contain1. There is a special dearth of nuance to the few convos I did find, in that the advice was largely to say “I’m on sabbatical, email me next year.” Or even to include a statement that “emails received during this period will be automatically deleted.” While that sounds tantalizing (and very in line with advice from productivity gurus), it’s not viable if you, like me, are not on the tenure track or identify as any of the typically marginalized demographics in STEM/academia. Many of us will need to finesse something between “I’m deleting everything this year” and “I have university permission not to, but I’m nice, so don’t worry—I’ll reply to your emails right away/soon-ish!”
Apart from one blog post I spotted, there’s also no advice in the ecology or scicomm realms about how to tell people you supervise that you’ll be doing things differently for a year.
I also didn’t find anything that discusses how to convey this info (and plan for such a reality) to collaborators of projects not the central focus of a sabbatical.
Essentially, there was little-to-no advice on the internet to help me anticipate or handle an 80% change in my job responsibilities for the next year, let alone help me help folks I work with/advise to navigate these changes.
So, today, I’m going to navel gaze a little and tell you what I decided to do. Perhaps this list of mine will serve as a bit of a check list/reflection guide if you’re looking ahead to a sabbatical yourself.
I don’t run a lab group, so I don’t have to make arrangements to keep in contact with or help advisees or employees keep up momentum while I’m less available.2
I do serve on graduate committees, though. I’ve notified those students and their primary advisors that my responses to emails will be delayed and they should (a) not take it personally, and (b) ideally plan accordingly to email me further in advance. Regularly scheduled meetings for these committees will remain on my calendar.
I run a campus-wide initiative to support scicomm capacity at my institution. I have not scheduled any new programming for the period of my sabbatical. I have paused enrollment for our online certification (although people currently enrolled can still actively pursue the tasks therein).
I co-run a grad student writing support program for six weeks each semester. The program involves one synchronous hour of facilitation per week, along with admin logistics and recruiting. I will keep up my part of that facilitation.
I co-run an annual, week-long proposal writing retreat for faculty and staff. It takes place at a beautiful, eclectic, rural facility which affords exceptional opportunity for focus and writing. I will keep up my part of that facilitation, in part because I proposed writing at least one grant proposal as part of my sabbatical work, and last month I identified a major, annual grant that would be a perfect next-step funding target for my current NSF-funded research program on enhancing scicomm training for grad students.
I will not be teaching, so I will not be fielding student correspondence.
I direct my department’s academic assessment program. We are in an “off year” based on assessment reporting cycles, so I don’t need to actively do/report on anything during my sabbatical.
I have decided to ignore the inbox monster and only read/respond to emails directly pertinent to work I need to do while on sabbatical.3 As I noted above, this feels a bit risky given my identities and the contingent nature of my position. However, it is standard operating procedure for folks on sabbaticals!
I’m relying on two tools in Outlook to reduce the effort of maintaining this boundary:An auto-reply4 that states I’m on sabbatical leave, will be in touch with folks I’m actively working with, won’t be running programs or courses until mid-August 2026, and that emails not relating to my sabbatical (or essential administrative tasks) will be archived/deleted.
I am building a suite of “rules” or filters in my Outlook inbox. These rules direct emails from people I need to stay in contact with to a new folder entitled “Sabbatical Inbox.” I will monitor my main inbox through the end of this month, to ensure I have identified everyone who should be routed to Sabbatical Inbox (SI). After that, I will only check SI until next August.5 The folks who are being routed to SI include collaborators, grad students whose committees I’m on, my department head, staff in our dean’s office, and professional organizations, newsletters, etc., that I want to stay aware of.
For active collaborators, I created a modified “signature”6 in Outlook that includes the following note after my name: “P.S. I'm on sabbatical until mid-August 2026, but this project is on my to-do list during that time. I'm using email filters to keep an eye on active projects, so please feel free to keep emailing me about our work together! :)” This will enable me to readily respond to people I need to, concisely provide them necessary context, and eliminates the need to email each collaborator (I’ll surely miss someone!) announcing my sabbatical. It also saves me the trouble of typing that caveat/clarification over and over when I first reply to their emails now, as they receive my auto-reply without other warning.
The catch-22 of this system is that I also have a book coming out in November, from University of Chicago Press! I want and need to interact with people (e.g., my co-author, the indexer, publishing staff, etc.) about that book over the next year. I’m building filters now for everyone I can anticipate. But, I’m also building a catch-all filter that has every keyword, the title, etc., that I can think of. Hopefully that web will catch other relevant emails (e.g., media queries, editors of “off the book” pieces I pitch, etc.).
How about you?
Have you created (or seen) professional-yet-firm examples of sabbatical out-of-office/auto-replies that you thought worked especially well? What other tools or processes have you used to manage (and help collaborators/advisees navigate) a major shift in your work focus?
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Granted, I spent a while online (but did not do an exhaustive search), and did find a few discussion forum threads about sabbatical email replies. None were very helpful, though.
In discussion with colleagues who do run labs, I’ve heard of strategies including moving all lab communications to Slack/Teams, etc., asking lab folks to text versus email, graduating out all students before going on sabbatical, using email inbox filters to manage what emails you see regularly, etc.
While this will be challenging, regular readers of School of Good Trouble will know I’ve been working for years to set firm boundaries and to balance sustainable productivity with the other aspects of my life that making being human meaningful.
Feel free to email my work email address (bmerkle AT uwyo DOT edu) if you want to see the full auto-reply text. Don’t worry…you’re not clogging my inbox; I won’t read or respond to your message! 🤪 If you want a response, comment here or find me on BlueSky and LinkedIn.
This approach works for me because, since May 2024, I have routed all emails to a folder, totally bypassing my main inbox. I then move relevant emails back into my inbox as needed. This process enables me to work in/from my inbox without constantly encountering new (and mostly irrelevant) emails. I also don’t care about inbox zero, so it doesn’t matter at all to me how many emails pile up in my inbox or these “sub-inboxes.”
I wish I could remember who I learned this trick from (maybe Loleen Berdhal from Academia Made Easier?!), but I have numerous email “signatures” that are actually template email responses. The one I use the most is a response to prospective grad students that includes clarification that I do not maintain a lab, that their queries will be more effective if they customize them to each PI they email (I get approached most by people who want to do biomedical or ecology research), and directing them to a blog post I wrote years ago with template-level advice about how to write a grad school query letter. I know a lot of faculty don’t have time to offer a response to every prospective student, and I understand that. However, I want to share resources with students who often clearly have no idea about grad school application etiquette, because I didn’t either!!! Making this signature-as-template-response enabled me to easily hit reply, select that signature, hit send, and move on; it saves me a lot of time while demystifying this aspect of academia’s hidden curriculum.