If I'd have known you were gone...

That's why I don't post that I'm GONE gone. I just say "out of the office." LOL. I ain't tellin all you troublemakers that I'm going to be down in Jamaica for 5 days.

Even if you had help (from an assistant, or someone), you would experience the same thing -- instead of getting messages from customers, you would be getting them from your assistants or co-workers instead (or your bosses or business partners, or your server sending you notifications when its hard drive is failing, which my server would do, etc.).  There is no way to avoid this, other than not having a job.  I'm retired, and the biggest gain in a retired life is the time I don't have to spend on business communications in a job.  And that is one reason I'm reluctant in taking on paid jobs on this site, because I know if I did, the amount of communications, coordination with the client, back and forth and back, would increase tenfold.

Yeah, that's the number one reason why I stopped doing consulting work and even stopped taking on tech support jobs: I do not want to be on someone else's schedule. At least this way, if I know I'm going out of town for a week, I can queue up videos and have them scheduled to release one a day, and things pretty much run automatically on the website as far as orders go.

You guys and the moderators are wonderful in answering user questions on here, and I thank you very much for that. I try to make it very clear when people place an order that tech support is not guaranteed or included in what you're buying. You're buying the videos and that's all I'm liable for. The forums here are wonderful, and you guys help me out a lot by answering people's questions, but there's no possible way I could do this all by myself.

I've automated as much as I possibly can as far as signups, changing memberships, canceling a membership, or ordering new classes, so that pretty much all handles itself. But the number one thing that I get emails on that I really can't automate or even hire someone else to do is the person that says, "I need to be able to do this, and this, and this with my database. What classes do I need to purchase?" I would literally have to clone myself or hire someone with the knowledge that I have and the knowledge of all of my courses, and that's just simply not going to happen. Unfortunately, that's the number one type of email that I get that I can't automate.

I get copies of all the customer service emails on my phone when I'm away, and I usually respond to people saying, "I'm out of the office till Monday. I'll get back to you then." Or, "If it's urgent, let me know," and it's usually only a handful of emails a day, which is easy to keep up with on a daily basis. But after being out of the office for a week, those handful of daily emails can turn into 50-100 emails.