Photo of Warren on San Juan Island by Maria Ross
Do you start dreading going back to work the minute you leave on vacation? Does the thought of all those emails and tasks piling up prevent you from enjoying your time off?
Most people do struggle with this, and many seek to resolve it by keeping up with email and work while on vacation. Hey, whatever works for you (but it doesn’t sound like much of a vacation).
We just got back from 72 hours of disconnected bliss on San Juan Island, and I interviewed Warren on our last morning to see how he was going to adjust to going back to work.
Here are 5 tips for you to ease back into the workweek after a vacation:
- Have a quick meeting with your closest coworkers when you get back to get up to speed on things that happened while you were gone. This one step will save you hours on email and phone followup. (If you were really prepared, you would have designated one or two of them as your contact points for clients/coworkers while gone and let them take care of anything urgent or important).
- Sort your email by person or project and process the most important ones first. Start with the most recent to make sure you aren’t solving problems that have already been resolved.
- Scan the rest of your email and delete/archive anything that you know was already resolved (minor emergencies, reminders of meetings that have already passed, etc.). Be brutal about this – everyone knows you were on vacation, and if something is truly important and you delete you will get a followup email.
- Make any return calls after you’ve caught up on what’s going on. It is really unproductive and frustrating to call a client back when you don’t know what’s going on, which means you’ll have to call back again. Get the scoop first.
- Take your full lunch break and leave work on time. No one should be punished for taking a vacation, and we typically are harder on ourselves than anyone else would be about catching up after time off.
Vacation is meant to recharge your batteries. Ease back into work just like you eased into vacation (you didn’t stop thinking about work right away, did you?). If you make yourself frazzled on your first day back, you just lose that relaxed feeling you gained on vacation.
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Betsy Talbot writes about carving the lifestyle you want out of the life you already have. When she’s not writing, she’s paring down, saving up, and getting ready for a year of travel with her husband Warren.
About Betsy
Warren has a certain, shall we say, glow?!? What did you do to him?? Sounds like you had a fabulous time – congrats!
We had a great time, Karen. Later this week I’ll have a recap of the trip, including a video of the deer who wandered up to me as I was reading a book on the front porch of the cabin. Wow!
Warren took tons of great pictures – whales, foxes, deer, and gorgeous landscape. And getting to your destination by way of a ferry and gorgeous scenery is a great way to start a vacation.
We’ve gone up to the San Juans in the fall for the past two years and unplugged for a weekend. I’ve forgotten how nice it is and how great it is to come home refreshed with lots of brand new ideas. Thanks for the reminder, I need to plan my San Juan weekend today.
Kelly, we’ll have a big post later with lots of great pics from the trip. It was my second visit, and I loved it even more than the first. Nice to have a great getaway so close to Seattle.
I’ll be staying tuned for your post on Hawaii very soon!
Two other things I like to do when going on vacation (just got back from a semi-unplugged 10 days).
1) Set-up rules that take all the news feeds / daily news updates that I get and route them into a _later folder while I’m on vacation. Its not critical that I read all of these and I can go back and look at the _later folder after I’ve gone though all the key messages that I need to read. I also recommend not turning off the rule until you really feel caught up. When I get back I often will sort and just drag a ton of messages that I know don’t need immediate attention to that folder too. This clears the clutter and lets me focus on the really important items.
2) If you have to monitor your mail when traveling just look for the important stuff. You don’t need to answer it immediately and ruin your vacation. Sometimes it will fix itself in a few hours. You don’t need to respond immediately … if it is immediate and nobody can solve it you will likely get a call from the person who is minding your role.
I also take some perverse sense of pleasure in just deleting things that I know will sort themselves out while I’m gone. If they don’t I’m sure there will be an email waiting for you the day you get back or shortly after folks see your return but 99% of the time the issue does go away.
Love the idea of just letting things sort themselves out. I mean really, if you are that important to your job that you can’t even take time off without things falling apart then you probably aren’t being paid enough.
Nice to let others step up to the plate and take care of things, too. After all, you’d do the same for them. Thanks for stopping by, James.
Some great tips — being aware of the transition is key. That way you can maintain a certain sense of self-awareness that will make it easy to slide back into the day-to-day stuff without letting it consume you. That being said, i understand how easily it happens!