This is my first week back after two weeks off (I aim for three complete weeks off a year). Even if I had reached InboxZero (and ToDoZero and so on…), there was two weeks of requests, reports and rubbish piled on top of what was already scheduled. I wasn’t even completely offline this time and was forwarding urgent incoming messages to other members of our co-op, but the backlog is still significant.
How you deal with this? Basically, I arrive back and I feel like I’m already behind. The good feeling of being up-to-date seems like a distant memory. The clear day I allocated to dealt with things that arrived seemed inadequate. Was that just bad luck because a lot of stuff came in, or is there a rule-of-thumb for how much catch-up time to allocate?
3 Lessons Learned From 6 Days Off The Grid | Social Butterfly Guy offers a view on how to prioritise things, but it still looks like catch-up takes hours. Can you see any ways to make it more efficient but still please clients, collaborators and co-op members?
I’m a big fan of jus taking all the mail received during a vacation period and putting it into a seperate folder, sure it may sit there still requiring your attention but it won’t be quite so overwhelming. Not really an efficiency technique as just a morale-coping mechanism.
And when you go to work through the mail in the new folder, it is a static pile, so new things coming in don’t offer a distraction.
I don’t really have any shortcuts, but if I’m away for a week I’ll let everyone know that I’m unreachable during that time, and the following week I’ll be available for important things but will be catching up so I probably won’t get to everything quickly, so they can either be patient or contact someone else on my team. Both work and volunteer obligations have always been fine with this. That first week back usually gives me enough time to catch up on important things, but it can take a few weeks to really feel on top of everything again.