The Cardinal Rule of Professional DMs
An OOO isn’t just about availability. It’s a boundary
Today was the last official day of a nearly two-week vacation I’d been planning for several months.
When you’re self-employed, ‘vacation’ is about a thousand percent more difficult to pull off than when you have a salary and PTO. Partly this is because self-employment means you’re in charge of administering your workflow weeks or months in advance, which is what your manager essentially does for you when you work for someone else. And partly because when you’re a freelancer, people you’ve never even met seem to assume you’re always on-call.
Which brings me to the point of this post.
A few days ago, I was checking Twitter during a rare moment of internet connectivity (I was completely off the grid on a permaculture farm/bnb/communal experiment thing in Costa Rica, but more to the point, I was on vacation) when I saw a message from a name I didn’t recognize.
“Hi Kelli, I know you’re OOO, but…”
I didn’t read the rest. What I did do was hit the little ‘delete message’ icon faster than I ever have before. Sure, I’ve gotten death threats over stuff I’ve written, but this message had me well and truly scandalized!
