Okay, maybe the title is a bit dramatic, but hear me out. Vacation responders, those automatic emails that tell would-be correspondents that you are away from your inbox, are contributing to unrealistic work demands. The vacation responder directly implies that if it is not activated, the response should be prompt. It sets up a false binary wherein we are either working or on vacation. Its easy to tell that the work/vacation split is dubious because these two states of being that are in increasingly short supply. Lots of people are out of work, and those who do have jobs are working longer hours than ever before. Obviously vacation responders aren’t the cause of our economic woes (that can be found here) but they do enforce the worst parts of late capitalism’s work ethics.

Good email etiquette (helpful advice that everyone [especially over 40] ignores here, here, and here) says that you should always promptly reply to emails sent directly to you. The vacation responder is meant to excuse you of this requirement by automating your “sorry I’ll get to this later” reply. What vacation responders actually do is reinforce the idea that we should always be accessible for productive work. To not be willing and ready to do work is treated as an exceptional state, as something that is inherently temporary and insincerely apologetic.

Its pretty safe to say that if a large organization has ever given you an email address with your name on it, you’ve used a vacation responder. I certainly have, multiple times, and for lots of different reasons. When I do field work in places with spotty network connections I’ll usually set something up that asks for patience while I find a connection. I used to set one up when I knew I’d be taking some kind of extended break from my normal routine and wanted to insulate myself from outside demands on my time. This past month, however, I did something much different that I like a lot better. Before I describe it I should offer a few caveats: 1) the nature of my work lets me be flexible with time and commitments. Obviously this won’t work for everyone and I’ll concede that vacation responders are necessary for some kinds of work. 2) It requires a kind of literacy with technology that is not evenly distributed amongst most people who have to use email. 3) If I miss an email or somehow mess up my personal replies the consequences are pretty mundane. Others are in a much more precarious position.

I got married two weeks ago (yay!) and for the whole week leading up to the wedding and the subsequent week-long honeymoon up the East Coast I was mostly unreachable but I never set a vacation responder.  Instead, I did my due diligence in letting most of the people I work with that I’d be incommunicado for a few weeks. My Cyborgology and Theorizing the Web collaborators knew I’d be away, as did most of my department. Anyone that I didn’t get in touch with was given a short, personal reply that said I’d get to it when I got back from my trip. I’d steal one or two minutes every third day or so (that’s all it took) to write one or two sentence replies. Anyone that might have fallen through the cracks is currently getting a very apologetic email.

Mastery of email doesn’t come from greedily emptying your own inbox. Rather it is trying to send out the least amount of emails as possible. I (which, for the purposes of this essay, is composed of both my conscious self and the algorithms that I set in motion to communicate on my behalf) sent much fewer emails in total than with a vacation responder. That’s important.

As I mentioned earlier, I occupy a somewhat privileged status where I can be really flexible with my workload. I don’t have clients or coworkers that expect a prompt response. Generally, if I don’t do something on time it just makes me look bad. My system for handling email isn’t some kind of correspondence utopia, but I do think we should be striving toward less vacation responders. That means reducing the jobs and instances that absolutely require them, and encouraging those that don’t need them to not use them. The vacation responder imposes a subtle but nearly-ubiquitous pressure to always have an excuse for not working. I’m not railing against the vacation responder itself per se, so much as the world that demands the vacation responder. It represents a world where we’re always “on” and our labor is always available and exploitable. We are still a long ways away from realizing each others’ right to be lazy but until then perhaps we can cut each other some slack.

David is on Twitter and Tumblr.