Back on the Wagon After a Break
As I mentioned in my last post, August was all about "prepare" for me. Prepare for the fun days of summer to end and back to a routine. I went ahead and took a little over a week off to refresh my mind. If you've been a reader for a while, you know that this isn't unusual. Every few months, I need a blog-sabbatical where I can refresh my ideas and prepare for the next few months of blogging.
But, all vacations end. This week I'm focusing on routines to come out of vacation mode and back into working mode. Here are the things I do to get back into the zone after a vacation.
1. Eat right. I don't go off the rails on vacation, but it's easier to eat that extra dessert when I'm not at home. That first day of coming home and starting to get back into my normal routine of when, how, and what I eat is the most important thing.
2. Pick some projects with a hard deadline to work through. This week (it's Monday now), I have a project with a hard deadline of Friday. Yay! This gives me a framework to hit the ground running, without having that sluggish "easing in" phase.
3. Have a list of priorities. That first week back, I pick one thing I have to be done every day, without exception. Focusing in on that one thing every day drives productivity forward, and makes every day seem like a victory.
4. Inbox Zero. Before I left, I killed off my whole inbox. Yes, the elusive Inbox Zero! Then, everything was handled until I got home, when I could tackle all of my emails that day and be done.
5. Try to schedule a day between coming back from vacation and going to work. I take the Sunday after a vacation to recuperate. Clean my house. Pet my dog. Do laundry. Go to the grocery. Not worry about working for a full 24 hours.
To be fair, I wasn't exactly idle during this time...we were traveling across the Southwest US, and I was also working on some new freebies for the Freebie Vault, going live soon. In fact, for the rest of the year, we'll be having Freebie Fridays! New free things will be published and served up for you every other Friday starting on September 7th! That's as close as I could get to being back on the wagon after my extended sabbatical.
