Out Of Office On: Setting Boundaries And Disconnecting From Work For A Stress-Free Holiday

[00:00:33] Hey guys, welcome back to The Digital Diet Podcast. I’m your host, Marisha Pink, aka The Digital Diet Coach, and today we are going to be talking about a subject very close to my heart, summer holidays. I just got back from Bali not long ago, and it was the most glorious trip. It was a complete switch off from all forms of work and I cannot tell you how restorative it was.

[00:00:59] And I know that I’m really really lucky because I’m self-employed, and so I structure my time in a way that allows me to take three to four week trips at fairly regular intervals throughout the year. And I’m pretty convinced that that’s the reason I have fewer grey hairs and fewer wrinkles than a lot of other people that I know that are around the same age.

[00:01:20] And that might be anecdotal but I know that there is some proof and some evidence for the general benefits of taking holidays. Taking time away from work to relax really enhances your mood, it lowers your stress, and it decreases your risk of developing heart disease. And all of those things, inevitably, will make you more energetic, more motivated, and more productive by the time you get back to work. So why don’t more of us take more time away from work for a holiday?

[00:01:52] And so today, I want to talk about how important it is to switch off. And not just that, but how important it is to set the boundaries with your work to make that switch off possible. I don’t know if it’s running globally, but there’s an ad by British Airways that is running again in the UK at the moment. They kind of do it every holiday season.

[00:02:12] But it essentially says, “take your holidays seriously, because not doing so could literally kill you.” And it had a lot of hype because it’s a very clever ad. There’s a woman who’s on holiday who tells you to take it seriously, rejects a work phone call, and then depending on which version of the ad you’ve seen, she rejects a phone call on somebody who’s sitting next to her at the bar on their work phone as well.

[00:02:34] And it’s a very funny ad and it’s very relatable, but it is grounded in some real research and some real statistics. It would appear that 50% of working age UK adults don’t take their full allocation of annual leave. 48% of working Brits have checked their work emails while they’re away, according to a survey by BA. And it’s not because they want to or they don’t think that relaxation is important or necessary, because 79% of those that were asked in that same BA survey agreed that taking a break is good for their mental health.

[00:03:11] And although the campaign might seem like it’s exaggerated, it really isn’t. It’s a scary but true statistic that people who don’t take holidays regularly tend to die sooner. And it comes from this 40 year study presented at the European Society of Cardiology in 2018, that was eventually published in the Journal of Nutrition, Health and Aging, that basically says that you can expect increased mortality, or death, despite successful multifactorial cardiovascular risk reduction in healthy men.

[00:03:41] What does that mean? The study looked at men, and one group of men received a bunch of interventions and a bunch of advice to try and reduce their cardiovascular risks. So that relates to diet, relates to exercise, relates to smoking cessation, weight management, even they received different types of drugs to help manage those risks. And the other group in the study didn’t.

[00:04:06] The finding is so scary because it’s in the group that actually _received_ all those health interventions, and that advice, that the death rate was higher. And when the researchers looked at the data, they found that shorter holidays were associated with a greater death rate in that intervention group. So remember, the ones that had all the health advice.

[00:04:27] And men who took three weeks or less annual vacation had a 37% greater chance of dying than those who took more than three weeks. And what’s even more surprising, is that this holiday time, short holiday or long holiday, had no impact on the risk of death in the control group. So that’s the group that didn’t have any interventions, didn’t have any health advice.

[00:04:49] Professor Strandberg, who’s one of the authors of the study, did seem to suggest that maybe this was because all of the damage and all of the harm caused by an intensive lifestyle regime, which is full of stress, is probably concentrated in that subgroup of the men who had shorter yearly vacation time.

[00:05:07] So when you have shorter vacation time, you typically are working more, you’re working more intensively, you’re sleeping less than those people who take longer vacations, and that whole stressful, intense lifestyle perhaps can overrule the benefit of any of those health interventions and the advice that those men were given.

[00:05:25] And even more weirdly, the researchers think that it’s possible that all those health interventions and all that advice may have actually had the opposite psychological effect on these men by just adding stress to their lives, because there’s more things for them to think about, and manage, and do.

[00:05:40] But nonetheless, this is a real statistic, and really the takeaway here is that it’s important that you take holiday. And so, if the science says that it’s important that you take holiday, and we all intuitively feel that we should be taking holiday, because that will make us be more relaxed and it will be good for our mental health, why are you not taking it?

[00:06:00] And I suspect that there are a couple of main reasons why people don’t take their holiday. The first one is that annual leave allowances are low. We actually don’t have as much holiday to take as we should. If you’re somewhere like the USA, maybe you don’t get much holiday to begin with. It’s typically, I think, something like 10 days, which is madness to me. And is probably madness to anybody else in Europe, at least, who’s listening to this.

[00:06:24] But you don’t have a lot in your allowance, so you don’t take that much. You’re certainly not going to be able to get up to three weeks worth of holiday, if you only have two weeks that you’re able to take. But the other reason that perhaps you don’t use them for holidays, or just breaks, is that you need to use it for other life events.

[00:06:39] Maybe you need to use that time for weddings, you maybe need to use it to cover the kids’ school holidays. And in the last, I think year or so, in particular, there have been teachers’ strikes, so parents have had to take time off to cover childcare on those days of the strikes, when the school is closed. And there’s inset days.

[00:06:57] Maybe you’re moving house. Maybe you’ve got some other appointments or medical appointments. Maybe you’re forced to take off time at certain points in the year. So, I know that there are companies, I’ve been unfortunately part of one, very early on in my career, where we were forced to take off the days between Christmas and New Year, and those days came out of your holiday entitlement, which wasn’t that big to begin with.

[00:07:20] So we don’t have a lot of time to play with in the first place. But then there is also this expectation about _how_ and _when_ you’ll use your annual leave. So, in most places you need permission to take off more than two weeks at a time, and that permission will only be granted for really specific and special reasons. Like if you got married and you want to take a honeymoon. Or if you are working somewhere that’s different to the place where you grew up, and you need to travel back home to see friends and see family once a year or twice a year.

[00:07:51] And it’s always been really weird to me that you should need to justify _how_ you want to use your entitlement and _why_ you need to take a certain time off, at certain times of the year. As long as you are somewhat mindful of how that may impact the work that needs to be done, I don’t actually think it’s anyone’s business. But here we are.

[00:08:10] And you even have expectations in some industries, so in the finance industry, for example, where you’re forced to take at least one two week break. So you can’t choose to have a series of one week breaks throughout the year. You _have_ to, somewhere, use part of your holiday entitlement to take a two week break.

[00:08:28] And this isn’t for your personal enjoyment. It’s not because they think that you must have two weeks off to make sure that you truly rest, and relax, and recuperate, and unwind. It’s for auditing and compliance reasons. They shut you out of all of the systems. They shut off your email, which is not a bad thing, by the way, but they shut you out of everything so they can check that you’re not doing anything dodgy. So it’s actually self-serving, even though it may benefit you by forcing you to take that break.

[00:08:53] Which brings me to the third reason, which is there’s never a good time to take time off work. Now that obviously depends on what you do, but for most people working in a professional capacity, there is _always_ something happening that’s important or urgent, or there are other people on holiday when you were planning to go. So you put it off.

[00:09:14] And then you end up with that mad, end of year scramble as soon as HR sends an email that says you can’t roll over more than five days into the following year. And so everyone suddenly starts trying to book off all the time that they have not used throughout the year to take regular breaks.

[00:09:30] And all that does is it compounds the problem for the following year. Because unless you know that you have something bigger happening the following year, so maybe it’s the wedding that you maybe need extra days for or you’re planning a trip back home after two years or three years. Unless you have something like that, all you’re doing is creating more time that you’re actually not going to end up taking. And oftentimes there’s a limit on when you can use it. So if you haven’t used it in the first three months, you just lose it completely. You don’t get paid for it, it’s just gone.

[00:09:58] Now, let’s imagine for a second that you’ve actually booked your time off, you’ve taken time off, you’re leaving, you’ve got a nice holiday planned. Please tell me why so many of you take your work devices on vacation with you and don’t switch off? Most of the time people don’t take their laptops, they think that that’s okay. But let’s be honest, work phones are basically like mini computers these days, especially if you’ve got an Apple or Android smartphone.

[00:10:25] And if you normally use your work devices for personal use, then you also feel compelled to take it or have to take it because you don’t have any other options. And all that leads to is you continuing to monitor work emails, continuing to monitor and maybe even respond to Teams chats or Slack channels.

[00:10:45] Sometimes, if you have taken your laptop or even just from your phone, you end up using your own personal holiday time to catch up on work. Because it’s an opportunity to do so without being disturbed, because no-one’s expecting you to respond, because you’re supposed to be on holiday.

[00:11:00] And then, at the end of it all, you read all your emails and start stressing yourself, and panicking, and getting anxiety about what’s going to happen when you return to work on Monday morning, to avoid that Monday morning, first day back, 500 unread emails experience that all of us hate. So even if you’re taking your time off, in a lot of cases you’re not actually switching off mentally.

[00:11:21] And the other ,reason why I think it’s so difficult for people to take holidays is that you don’t empower your teams and your colleagues to do their jobs. Or you just don’t trust them not to fuck shit up in your absence. And what that looks like is that you tell your co-workers that they can contact you if they need to- so many of them do. You tell them that they can send things to you to review or to approve, and that you will make time somewhere between the massages and the margaritas on the beach. And so they also expect that you will still be working in some capacity.

[00:11:56] And it’s either that or, because you don’t trust people and you don’t empower people, you end up trying to do two weeks work in one week, the week before your vacation, so that there isn’t anything major or only minimal things that you would need to hand over for your co-workers to do in your absence. But that creates a tremendous amount of stress, right before you are about to go on holiday, that it will take even more time to unwind from. And just as you’re doing that, it’s time to come home and go back to work.

[00:12:25] So it’s not really all that relaxing. And I was thinking about this as I was preparing for this episode, because I have found myself, not now that I am self-employed, but certainly when I was a permanent employee in various different jobs, experiencing many or all of these different things.

[00:12:41] I remember, as I said a bit earlier in the episode, in one of my first jobs that I was given 20 days of holiday. Four of those had to be used between Christmas and New Year when the office was shut, which is their decision. It’s not mine, I could have worked. I had to take two days off for two funerals. One of my grandparents and my boyfriend at the time’s grandparents had passed away, and grandparents do not count as being close enough in the family hierarchy, according to the place I was working, to qualify for compassionate leave.

[00:13:12] So before I’d even got started, I had 14 days that I was able to have of my choosing. And at that time, I was covering a really big account where we were launching a product. And I had a manager who had just returned from maternity leave, so she was only working part-time. So that meant on two days of the week, I was the only available dedicated client contact. And there were four clients and one of me.

[00:13:37] So I was already working 40 hours a week contractually. And it’s very common in a lot of industries, but also in advertising, to waive the EU Directive of 48 hours maximum. And we’re not part of the European Union anymore, so I don’t even know if it would apply. But I was routinely doing 50 hours, 60 hours. I was doing travel. I was doing occasional overnights for events. There was just never a good time to take time off.

[00:14:04] So, even if I’d _wanted_ to take those 14 days off, I don’t even know where I would have been able to begin. And then because of all of that overtime, and some of those overnights and the travel for events, I was actually accruing time in lieu that I was owed. And I was so busy that I _still_ couldn’t use it, and I still couldn’t take it off. So we’re just creating and compounding a problem here.

[00:14:25] And I, really as I thought about this, realised that this is a recurring theme. And maybe it’s the industry I worked in. Maybe it was me having poor boundaries and work practices when I was earlier on in my career. But it’s very much a recurring theme that just got worse with the arrival of a work mobile phone and a work laptop, that I then started taking away with me on my holidays.

[00:14:45] I remember before one trip, my dad driving me to Gatwick Airport, and me sitting in the passenger seat of the car, on a Saturday, still working, still typing away with my work laptop, all the way to the airport. It’s about an hour and a half’s drive, I think, from my parents’ house.

[00:15:03] Just still working. And it’s like, should have been finished by now, but there was just so much to do. There was not enough time. There was not enough people to do it. There were still so many demands on my head. And I got to that holiday and I was so exhausted, that I just couldn’t do anything for the first two or three days. And I remember my friend that I was with, when we arrived saying, “oh, maybe we should go for a little walk along the beach,” and I just went to bed. I just literally went to bed for the first 48 hours because I just was so wiped.

[00:15:32] And at that time, I did have a team that I trusted and a team that was very competent and very capable. There was just too much work and it was just never a good time to go away, and I had chosen to go away around the time of my birthday. But I have also worked in teams where the team is not great and you don’t trust the team. And I remember, again, a client saying to me once, as I was trying to plan ahead and plan for a project, a client actually saying to me that she would rather wait for me to come back from my two week holiday, than let my boss touch the project while I was gone.

[00:16:04] And the thing is, even though she said that, I was fully aware that I was going to be gone for two weeks and we just couldn’t afford to lose those two weeks in the timeline for that project. So again, in the run up to that trip, it was absolute hell. I was trying to do two extra weeks worth of work in the same two weeks, while doing the same tasks that need to be done during those two weeks.

[00:16:24] And to be honest, I dreaded coming back because I knew what would be waiting for me, and I knew that nothing would have happened while I’d been gone. And that means I didn’t relax as much as I should have while I was away either. So it’s the perfect storm of all of these different things that I’ve been talking about, that just means we don’t end up taking the holidays that we should have, and we don’t end up even switching off the way that we should if we take that time off.

[00:16:47] And actually that’s one of the reasons why I created my #TechTimeoutChallenge. Now if you’re not familiar with it, the #TechTimeoutChallenge is a 30-day digital detox programme. It’s completely free, I will put the link in the show notes. But essentially, what you do is you take a small amount of time each day, sometimes it’s only 15 minutes, sometimes it’s a bit longer, but you take that time to completely disconnect from all of your digital devices and all of the things it gives you access to, and you do something just for you instead.

[00:17:19] And the guide, which is what you’ll get if you follow the link and you sign up to do the challenge, is packed with 30 different things that will stimulate you mentally, emotionally, get you moving your body. You don’t have to think about what you do in that downtime, you just have to follow it and do it. It’s a great place to start if you’re someone that feels, or is starting to feel, like work is taking over your life. Or being connected is taking over your life and you’re just consumed by being “always on” and embroiled in this “always on” culture and always being available.

[00:17:52] Just is a way to start carving out a little bit of time each day, if you feel like it’s just not practical for you to take an actual vacation, or a chunk of time. As I said, it’s often never a good time to do it, and we’re going to talk in a moment about how we change that. But a little bit of a small intervention, check out the #TechTimeoutChallenge, I will put the link in the show notes.

[00:18:13] For a longer-term plan, how do you make sure that you actually use your holiday entitlement and make sure that you enjoy your holiday? That you switch off from work and actually get the rest and the relaxation, and that disconnection which is the entire point of taking time off. Here is my advice to you.

[00:18:33] The first thing is, you need to plan your annual leave at the start of the holiday year. Don’t wait until you’re stressed, and you’re overworked, and you’re dying for a break to try and plan one, because prevention is better than cure. And you’ll already be so overwhelmed that the idea of planning a holiday is going to stress you out more.

[00:18:51] Holiday planning is really, really stressful, even though we all look forward to actually enjoying the holiday once we get there. Trying to find flights, and pick hotels, and organise transfers, and find someone to watch the dog; all of that stuff just adds more onto your plate.

[00:19:08] So what I want you to do is to think about what’s happening over the next 12 months in your life, think about how much annual leave you’ve got, and then start thinking about how you can spread your holiday out so that you get regular breaks. And a question that often pops up is, well, how long should you take at once?

[00:19:25] There’s some research that was published in the Journal of Happiness Studies that says that your happiness peaks on vacation around day 8. Then it starts to fade until around day 11, because you may start feeling homesick or you might start feeling disinterested, and want to revert back to your normal routine.

[00:19:43] And so, while I really love taking these 3-week, 4-week, month-long holidays, and the idea of doing that is really appealing to lots of people, it actually may be better for you to take shorter vacations throughout the year instead. That same study also noted that it took about eight days for people to let go of their stress and let go of their responsibilities from back home.

[00:20:05] So, although a four or five day vacation isn’t likely to result in long term relaxation or long term health benefits, and there is a sweet spot that appears to be somewhere between eight and ten days, I would still maintain that a break is better than no break. Because remember, we’re trying to stay alive here; not having a holiday will literally kill you, according to this 40-year old study.

[00:20:28] And if you start to plan your time off at the start of the holiday year, then you can also do some clever hacks. You can take advantage of public holidays to maximise your time off. So, for example, every year there’s an article about this, but at Easter in the UK, we have two public holidays. We have Good Friday and we have Easter Monday. So if you were to take those two weeks, you would actually be using eight days instead of ten days from your annual leave entitlement, because two of them are public holidays.

[00:20:56] And every now and again we get one of those random days thrown in because the King got coronated, or someone in the royal family got married, or one of those things. If we had won the Euro final, I think we might have got another one as well, but unfortunately that didn’t happen. You get the gist. And even if you just take five days off in a regular week, if you can try to go away at the weekend before and extend into the weekend after that week, then you can just stretch it out a little bit so you can hit that eight day sweet spot of happiness and relaxation.

[00:21:28] Getting in first and planning your holiday leave at the start of the holiday year also means that you get your pick. There is nothing worse than either having your holiday declined when you really, really need it, and if you’re a manager, having to decline holiday when you know that people in your team actually really need a break. Or trying to plan a holiday and not being able to have it, because something in the work schedule hasn’t gone to plan and now you have to work.

[00:21:56] If you already put your holiday for August in, in January, it doesn’t matter what is happening in August, that holiday is booked and it’s happening, and everybody will just have to work around it, including you. And if you get to August, and you don’t actually want to take the holiday then or you think it’s not a good time or you, something else has happened and you want to take the holiday at a different time, you can always move it.

[00:22:19] It’s okay. Plans change. But you need to plan to take all of your holiday entitlement, otherwise you don’t end up taking it all. And we run into this rollover problem that we discussed before. So that’s step one.

[00:22:31] Step two is to make sure that you’re communicating with your team and with your clients early, and that you actually empower them to do their jobs. You need to put your holidays in everyone’s calendars. You need to remind them a month out, probably again two weeks out, and then one week out. So that you keep it on their radar and that they can plan around your availability, if they’re going to be needing your input, or your review, or your approval, or your presence at a meeting.

[00:22:58] I work in a client-facing role, so I would also typically remind clients at the start of the week before I’m leaving, and again one day before. Also very common in my industry, but seemingly not that common in other places, is to write handover notes about two weeks out. And I say two weeks out, because the week before you go away is always really busy and really stressful. So do not leave it to the week before you’re going away to write your handover notes. It’s always chaos.

[00:23:26] And I also suggest that you are the one that writes those handover notes. Don’t rely on other people to remember what they’re supposed to do, or where files are located on the server, or when they’re supposed to be meeting with the client, based on their own brains. Or on whatever they hurriedly scribbled down in their notepad, when you were telling them over a Teams call. They probably won’t be able to decipher it a week later.

[00:23:49] You need to write your handover notes, type them up, circulate them, and then invite people to ask any questions before you leave. And I would typically include in that whatever the projects are that you’re covering, the tasks that need to be done. I’d list any important contacts and the contact details. I’d put links to the relevant files and folders, and I really highlight deadlines.

[00:24:14] And possibly that’s overkill, but I can also say that once I started doing that, nobody bothered me when I was on holiday. I also wasn’t checking, and we’re going to get to that in a moment, but literally it was idiot proof. So, the more idiot proof you can make your handover notes, the more you will be able to have peace of mind that everybody has everything they need to do the tasks that need to happen while you’re away. And everybody else will also feel comfortable that they have the tools that they need to execute whatever has to happen.

[00:24:42] I also really recommend having handover meetings with your co-workers the week before you leave to check that everything is clear and understood. Because, again, when you send out things on email and people go, “Yeah, thanks, cool, got it, understood,” but they didn’t actually read it, that’s when problems crop up while you’re away. It maybe sounds a little bit like micromanaging people, but I treat it more for my own sanity than for anything else.

[00:25:06] Make sure that everybody is clear about what it is that they have to do, whose responsibility it is. And then I would also usually try and be really clear about who is deputising for you. So for example, if things need reviewing or they need approvals, and that would hold up the progress on a particular piece of work, make sure that you have assigned someone to deputise for you, and identified someone who is senior who can act as a point of escalation, if there are any issues.

[00:25:34] There probably won’t be, but you just need to make sure that those people have been identified. Make sure that the people that are doing the work know who those people are, and how and where to contact them. And then also make sure that those people actually know that you’ve put them down and what’s going to be expected of them while you’re gone.

[00:25:50] And I think the most important one is to let everybody know your boundaries before you leave. So that goes for your team and your coworkers, as well as your clients. You need to clearly state that you will not be checking emails or taking work calls during your vacation.

[00:26:07] And I see this a lot with American clients of mine that are on vacation and their email out of office reply will say, ” I’m available on this number, if you need to get in touch with me for any reason.” And sometimes it will even be a personal number, it’s not even their work number, which I already have. Which means they’re leaving their work device behind, but that defeats the point if you’re still able to contact them and they’re inviting you to do so.

[00:26:31] I think we all need to remember that it’s very rarely a life or death situation. The world will not end if you are not available for a week or even two weeks. Anything that needs to be dealt with should be capable of being dealt with by the team that’s there. Especially if you’ve done those handover notes and you’ve clearly communicated who is in charge, and who is a point of escalation. Nobody should need to get in touch with you and you certainly shouldn’t be making yourself available. You have to hand over the reins and let go.

[00:27:01] And if you feel confident that you’ve done that, then you’ll feel much happier implementing point number three, which is to leave your work devices at home. Your work phones, your laptops, your tablets; leave them locked away securely in the office or at home, and that way you will avoid the temptation to pick them up and check work.

[00:27:21] And if you use them for personal reasons, and so you’re planning to take them on holiday for personal use, I would strongly suggest that you consider deleting work applications and apps. So that means delete email, delete Teams, delete Slack. Whatever it is, so that you can’t check or respond to messages or receive notifications. You can reinstall them all when you get back and typically they will pull back in the entire message history, so you haven’t lost anything. But you need to make it harder for yourself to engage in work when you’re supposed to be relaxing.

[00:27:56] And the same goes for calls. Turn on call forwarding. Forward all calls to voicemail and record a voicemail that says that you’re away. Or forward calls to the number of one of your coworkers or the office reception, whatever it needs to be. You don’t need to take calls in order to tell people that you’re not working and this is the person that they should talk to. You can set it all up before you go.

[00:28:18] In order to keep the vacation vibes going, do not download those apps or turn off the call forwarding until you are officially back at work. And I understand why people do this, but I am particularly passionate about this. You’re still on holiday until 9.00 am or 9.30 am or whatever time you start work rolls around on Monday morning.

[00:28:39] So don’t read the emails and read the messages, and get stressed out about situations and things that you can do absolutely nothing about at 10.00 pm on a Sunday night. Just wait until Monday morning when you’ve had a good night of sleep, and look at things with a fresh head and you are officially back to work.

[00:28:56] Which brings me to the final point, and the most obvious one, and the one that everybody loves to talk about on social media especially. Turn on your out of office and relax. Out of office auto replies are the best things. I find it so exhilarating. This is probably really sad of me, but it’s one of my favorite things to do. And it’s just like, “Marisha has left the building.”

[00:29:17] Put on your out of office auto reply. You can also now put status messages on other apps like Teams or Slack, even on WhatsApp. Just make it clear that you are not available. And to avoid all those annoying messages saying, “Oh, I can see that you’re away, but when are you back?” or, “When you’re back, can you take a look at this?” or, “I know you’re away, but could you look at this?” You need to be really, really clear.

[00:29:38] Say when you’re out. Say the date that you’re returning. Provide alternative contacts if something needs to be dealt with in your absence. And then say, I will deal with the rest of this when I get back, if it’s not urgent. That’s all you need to do. Do not, under any circumstances, leave your telephone number or encourage people to call you if they need to because someone somewhere will find a reason to call you. And I guarantee you, as I said, it’s not life or death in most circumstances.

[00:30:06] And the minute they do that, and if you end up seeing that message or speaking to someone, it disrupts the relaxation. It disrupts that whole zen holiday vibe that you should have going on. You’re not going to get to your peak eight days of happiness, if you have to keep resetting the clock every time you have an interaction to do with work.

[00:30:25] So hopefully if you can follow these tips, then you can take all of your annual leave and you can enjoy your holidays. And to make things a little bit easier for you, this is my challenge for you this week. Your challenge is to book in the rest of your annual leave for the current holiday year. I know everybody’s holiday years run slightly differently. For the companies that run alongside the calendar year, we’re now in August. You’ve still got, I can’t do maths, you’ve still got five months left? That’s bad maths. You’ve still got four months left.

[00:30:58] If you haven’t already made bookings, make them now. And then feel really, really good about the exciting adventures and the exciting time off for relaxation that you can have in that time. And I want to make sure that you actually do this. We love a bit of accountability here at The Digital Diet. So the place to let me know when you’ve done this is in The Digital Diet Lounge, which is my dedicated community space for all things digital wellness and women. I will put a link to the space in the show notes.

[00:31:24] It’s a wonderful place and I want to see all of you coming in and telling me, “Yes, I have booked the last five days that I have to use,” or, “I have booked a week’s holiday in the Dominican Republic!” Whatever it is, book the time off and then go wild, and just do something that you’ll actually look forward to.

[00:31:40] The show notes for today’s episode are over on my website at thedigitaldietcoach.com/028. So you can head over there and you will also find all the other episodes that we’ve done. If you haven’t already, then make sure that you also subscribe to the podcast wherever you’re listening. Doesn’t matter if it’s Apple, if it’s Spotify, if it’s Amazon Music. Subscribe to the podcast so that you will get more of these weekly challenges, more of these tips about living your best life and maintaining healthy tech habits, digital wellness and balance.

[00:32:15] That’s it for today. I know that you’re busy and I know your time is incredibly valuable. So as always, I thank you for choosing to spend a little bit of your day with me, and I will see you next time.