RIP OOO, Hello PTO: Your Email Auto-Responder Is Quiet Quitting, One Message at a Time

Now that Labor Day has come and gone, marking the unofficial end of summer, the tones of our inboxes are changing like the leaves on the trees. Gone are Summer Fridays, and human responses to messages will once again outnumber the automatic out-of-office replies.

While we blink through that auto-reply hangover, a common thread has emerged from those messages: telling the world you’re “OOO” has left the building. Now you’re more likely to hear that someone is “on PTO.” And no, it’s not your HR rep emailing you—it’s your coworker. What in the employee handbook is going on here?

People talked about feelings a lot more at work from 2020 to 2022 or so. A widespread mental health crisis snuck in, piggybacking on the pandemic for a catastrophic twofer, which some studies found fostered a heightened sense of humanity, camaraderie, and collaboration. It wasn’t unusual to see an email auto-responder or Slack status that warned of a slow response due to a mental health day or childcare responsibilities.

Now, however, a curious new trend is rearing its head in interoffice messaging and on social media: The need-to-know basis when colleagues aren’t on the clock, or, as you might see it phrased in that auto-reply, “on PTO.” Increasingly, workers aren’t specifying whether they’re sick, on vacation, getting married, or on parental leave, they are simply…not available. They’re not even out of the office—with so many workers operating in hybrid or remote capacities, the “office” is less a place and more a state of being, so how could you really be “out” of it? Simply stating that one is taking paid time off and leaving it at that has become more prevalent among those I polled.

Why did the pendulum swing from therapy-lingo—radical transparency, discussion of personal feelings and circumstances, a window into personal lives—to the robotic HR-speak of telling your colleagues you’re “on PTO”? The pandemic may have helped highlight humanity in the workplace, but the next natural step is those same people becoming more aware of the importance of that humanity and valuing their lives outside the workplace. A 2022 Gallup survey found that at least half of US workers do not feel actively engaged at work, with another 18% stating that they were “actively disengaged.” In the first quarter of 2024, the percentage of “actively engaged” workers, also surveyed by Gallup, hit an 11-year low of 30% and barely gained traction in Q2.

Across social media, a whole subset of gallows humor has emerged regarding the term: One TikToker jokes that before you can take PTO, you must understand that it actually stands for “prepare the others.” Another noted giddily that a coworker had updated his PTO calendar with “I just don’t want to work today, OK?” Another self-fived for taking time off for “no particular reason except having to burn some of this PTO time I have stored up.”

Alison Green, author of the popular advice blog Ask a Manager and a book of the same name, tells Vanity Fair via email that there’s a fine line between highlighting life outside of work and letting the email do its job by telling the sender without fanfare to wait for a reply.

“I have mixed feelings about people being more human in out-of-office messages generally,” she says. “On one hand, Yes, we are human and it’s good to recognize that at work, but I also don’t want people to feel they have to justify their time away. You don’t need to tell everyone that you’re away for a wedding or closing your house or sick with the flu to justify not being available! It should be enough to just explain you’re out…and to the extent that ‘on PTO’ is a vaguer way of doing that, it’s probably a good thing, at least seen through that lens.”

Think of the “on PTO” auto-response as the natural successor to the 2022 rise of “quiet quitting.” It’s the desk salad version of “Go girl, give us nothing”: sharing the essential information to get the point across, no exclamation points or bonus content to be found. The approach covers due diligence, removing the emotions from the equation by simply letting people know that damn it, you’re not there.

As one friend told me, “I noticed I’ve started to say ‘on PTO’ and it’s kind of like an ‘It’s none of your business, I’m just not here.’”

The author of this type of auto-response isn’t interested in well-wishes for their new baby (parental leave), sympathy for a death in the family (bereavement), or follow-up questions on how exactly that medical-procedure recovery is going. They’re seeking understanding that they’ll be checking email infrequently until their return, and, if any urgent questions emerge before then, for you to reach out to their deputy at the following email.

A 2024 Gallup survey found that 85% of remote workers said that improved work-life balance and flexibility were among the greatest benefits of working away from a set office location—defending those boundaries between work and life is essential to maintaining that coveted balance.

Another friend told me that the phrase on PTO “underscores the vibe of ‘this is a company benefit that I am entitled to, leave me alone, it’s not like I’m just ghosting.’”

OnTikTok, a popular content creator, Corporate Natalie, recorded a sketch imagining an employee desperately defending Castle PTO’s borders from siege on an increasingly bonkers series of Zoom calls reminding her coworkers that she’ll be unreachable. It’s a parody but familiar for a reason: A survey by the Movchan Agency found that 54% of workers admitted to working while on vacation, and 63% said they feel anxious if they don’t check their work messages while on vacation.

Courtney C.W. Guerra, author of Is This Working? The Businesslady’s Guide to Getting What You Want from Your Career, explains that “‘on PTO’ conveys ‘I’m fully off work, using a company benefit.’”

“In contrast to terms like ‘sick day’ or ‘on vacation,’ it keeps the reason for the employee’s absence private—recipients don’t get to speculate about how often Jimothy is traveling or whether Pamantha has an unusual number of medical issues,” she said. “Not to mention, at workplaces with pooled time off for both categories, vacation vs. sick leave might not be a meaningful distinction anyway.”

Guerra’s own auto-reply invokes “out of office,” even though she’s physically visited that spot all of twice since mid-May 2023. “I think I did say ‘away from work’ when I first went remote and was overthinking it,” she said.

Organizational psychologist Adam Grant, an author and University of Pennsylvania Wharton School of Business professor, returned from his own initial OOO stint to share with VF over email that “new auto-replies are an attempt to stop working from taking over our lives. People are trying to set clear boundaries and assert control over their time.” So far, he says, there’s been “surprisingly little research on this.”

But does that boundary hold? Maybe not, according to that Movchan study: 86% of respondents said they still received calls and messages from colleagues even when they had been clear that they were out of—pardon me, let me rephrase—on PTO.

Green also says that the wording, as with all cultural norms within a workplace, is self-perpetuating and ever-evolving, with workers unintentionally mimicking it, the same way they might buy a cute top that resembles one a colleague was recently wearing.

She recalls a long-ago experiment she and a coworker conducted in response to the “growing creep of corporate-speak in our office.”

“We started using ‘I’ll be out of orbit’ to mean ‘I’ll be unavailable,’” she said. “It took less than two weeks before we saw other coworkers saying it. (We were greatly amused with ourselves.) But really, I think lingo spreads fast in workplaces, which accounts for some of the most absurd corporate-speak that’s out there.”

Guerra agrees, saying, “I feel like it’s such a weird genre (especially with remote work making ‘out of office’ nonsensical if taken literally), so I can imagine someone seeing ‘on PTO’ and being like, ‘Ooh, that feels less awkward, I’m gonna say that from now on.’”

In other words? MYOB, I’m on PTO.