Chris Kresser: Yeah, absolutely. Maybe I’ll talk a little bit more about how I do the before-and-after of these things. I won’t go too far down that road because this is supposed to mostly focus on practice management, but I think it’s important.
Before I go, first of all, I let everyone know on my team well in advance that I’m going to be gone, and this allows them to prepare and present things to me that need my attention before I’m gone so I’m not just completely slammed with stuff to do for the few days before I leave. That’s something I’ve learned over time the hard way when I was first doing these. Now I plan much further in advance, and I let everyone know so that they can give me all the stuff that I need to do kind of well in advance of when I leave. And then, of course, I have my own checklist of things that I do.
Then I put an autoresponder on my email, and this has evolved over time, too. Initially the autoresponder just said, Hey, I’m taking some time away. I’m not going to be checking email or replying at all. Initially that was it. And then later when I had an assistant, I would direct people to my assistant if they needed help urgently with something while I was gone.
And then this last time, I did something even a little different, and this has to do with the reentry period after the digital detox. I’m sure, as any of you know if you’ve taken a vacation and you have stepped away from your email for a period of time, one of the worst parts about coming back is opening up your email and seeing 500 emails in your inbox. I hate that and it’s one of the parts that I dreaded about coming back from these digital detoxes, so this year I tried something a little bit different and in my autoresponder that people get when they email me, it said, I’m away. I’m doing a digital detox, not checking my email, and due to the volume of email that I receive, it’s really unlikely I’m going to even get through all of the emails that are sent to me while I’m gone, and I’m just not even going to bother to do that. If you have something that’s important that requires my attention, please email me again when I get back after this date. And this time when I came back, I just briefly scanned through the hundreds of emails that were there and didn’t really bother opening many of them and just opened a few that I wanted to open and then just kind of started from a clean slate. That worked really well. I was really happy with how that turned out.