My suitcase is packed! 🏖️

Are you vacation ready?

I am.

Honestly, I am more than ready! My brain is already on holiday.

As usual, I have very little time to prepare for my holidays.

Lately, I have been juggling project closures, handovers, coding for kids workshops, and administrative tasks to make sure I can step away knowing that my customers, colleagues, and projects are well supported while I am away.

Holidays are supposed to be relaxing, but all the work that happens beforehand can make it difficult to start them feeling relaxed.

When time is short and pressure grows, Copilot helps me find a way forward.

The worst-case scenarios we all try to avoid during holidays are things like:

• A stakeholder urgently needs our help but is unaware that we are on holidays.
• A meeting we were supposed to lead, but totally forgot to delegate nor reschedule.



Oops! This kind of things could happen.

What does it take to go on holidays?

Usually, it takes:

• Informing internal and external customers, colleagues, and stakeholders about your upcoming leave.
• Reviewing your calendar to decline, reschedule, or delegate meetings.
• Drafting and setting up out-of-office messages for Outlook, Teams, and for social media (if applies for you).
• 
  

The challenge is that the what and the who are hidden within your work data.

That's why holiday preparation is a great task to complete together with your AI assistant at work: Microsoft 365 Copilot Chat.

Here's a prompt that helps me make sure I don't forget any customer, project, meeting, or open conversation.

Holiday Preparation Prompt

## Goal

Help me prepare for and manage any stakeholders who may be impacted during my upcoming holiday leave.

## Context

I am preparing for time off from [START DATE] to [END DATE]. I want to avoid situations where stakeholders urgently need support but are unaware of my absence. I need to ensure continuity, clarity of ownership, and proactive communication.

## Source

Review my recent activity across Outlook, Teams, and my calendar to identify key stakeholders, ongoing conversations, and high-risk topics that may require attention while I am away.

Please focus specifically on:

- Recent emails requiring a response, unanswered threads, or emails saved in my Drafts folder.

- Recent Teams conversations that contain open questions or unresolved discussions.

- Meetings scheduled during my holiday period.

- Tasks on Planner due while I am away.

## Expectations

1. Identify my key stakeholders and active threads that could trigger urgent requests during my absence.

2. Draft proactive communication messages to notify them of my leave, including: My absence period, backup contacts or escalation paths, and available support options

3. Create a handover plan including: Tasks to delegate, suggested owners, and priority levels

4. Highlight any risks, dependencies, or gaps that should be addressed before I leave.

Deliver the response in clearly structured sections with bullet points and ready-to-send messages.

How did I end up with this prompt?

Please don't think I wrote this prompt line by line myself. Of course NOT!

I created the prompt using a prompting approached called meta-prompting. Concretely I used Copilot Prompt Coach.

Role clarity: Prompt Coach acted as prompt creator while I acted as prompt curator.

I am not saying this is the ultimative prompt.

All I am saying is Copilot helps me to prep for my holidays and this is how.

And if you want more ideas about how you could use Copilot to prep for your holidays, I highly recommend you to check the Out of Office Vacation Handoff instructions for Copilot Cowork.

Yes, even if you don't use Cowork.

Many of the same ideas and prompts can easily be adapted to Microsoft 365 Copilot Chat.

Here goes to the instructions: 🏖️ Out of Office Vacation Handoff | Agent Academy

Happy holiday season and see you in the next adoptAble edition! ☀️🏖️

Resposible AI - Transparency Note:

This adoptAble edition was written by me with the support of Microsoft 365 Copilot. Concretely, my role was content creator while Copilot assisted on fine-tunning.

Copilot delivered raw versions of following tasks:

• Brainstorm subtitle ideas based on the original text which I drafted and created myself
• Gave me ideas about ways to express things better and catchier in English
• Checked grammar and mispelling

Tasks Copilot did not help with:



• Copilot did not create the original text or draft
• Copilot did not assist with the creation of images
• Copilot did not assist with the creation of the responsible AI - Transparency notes
• Copilot did not assist with the About me section
• Copilot did not assist with the content structure
• Copilot did not assist with publishing the post