Unless you hit the lottery while you're on vacation or find buried treasure somewhere, in all likelihood you'll have to go back to work at some point.
But before you rush back into the grind of meetings, e-mails and memos, there are some strategies to make the "vacation hangover" much less stressful than you think. If the point of taking a vacation is to unwind and relax, jumping right back in might not be the best course of action.
Here are five tips we've come up with to help fight the vacation hangover blues:
1) Don't come back to work on a Monday. Mondays are when everyone comes back from a weekend as well, and if you return from a vacation on this day you're going to have to face everyone ready to give you new projects in addition to all of the stuff you might have to catch up on. Coming back on a Tuesday or later finds employees back in the groove, and they're less likely to harass you with 18 new projects. Also, planning a Wednesday-to-Tuesday vacation may save you lots of money on plane fare.
2) If you have to work on a Monday, go through your e-mail on Sunday night (or the day before you return). The worst thing for your mental state of mind is booting up your computer on your first day back and finding an inbox with 500 or more unread e-mails. Since many of these e-mails may be spam or unnecessary, getting a head-start on deleting them the night before may keep you less stressed when you're back at work the next day.
Also, some of the e-mails may have been sent up to five days earlier, so don't respond earlier to a message sent if there's a thread involved – jump in on the last message sent to avoid any time distortions.
A third (and interesting) strategy is to quickly scan for the important e-mails and delete all of the other ones. If something was really important, they can send you a message when you get back. After all, you had informed everyone of your vacation in the "auto-respond" e-mail, correct?
3) Return home from a vacation early. Nothing kills the high of a vacation worse than flying home on a Sunday night and then having to get up early for work the next day. Getting home a day earlier lets you unwind at home and take care of personal issues (like mowing the lawn, unpacking, etc.) before you jump back into the rat race at work. Of course, you can ignore this if your idea of vacation is to sit at home all week – by then you'll probably want to get out of the house as quickly as possible.
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Copyright 2008 Network World Inc.
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RE: Summer vacation hangover remedies By Sam on July 24, 2008, 8:10 pm Reply | Read entire comment Horrible article doesn't have any suggestion for what to do after a vacation once you get vacation.
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