Secrets to a good transition back to work after vacation

I was talking with a friend of mine yesterday and I was shocked when he told me that despite the fact that he had just spent 2 weeks on vacation in Florida and Arizona, after one day at work he no longer felt that “vacation feeling”.

I sympathized with him because after my first few work vacations, I felt the same way.   However, over the last few years I have developed a “plan” to significantly increase the chances that upon returning from vacation I don’t immediately lose the vacation feeling.

Thoughts?   Any other recommendations?

1. Take at least 7 full days off if you want to make it a true restful vacation (I prefer 11 days) – 7 days is long enough that your co-workers have to take on your work while you are gone.  As a result, it won’t pile up while you are away (dont forget though…what comes around goes around!)
2. Go someplace exotic and where there is seemingly no internet access – although ironically I have found that some of the most remote places are the ones that have the most internet cafes, by going to a “remote” place, it wont be assumed that you are checking email daily…  even if you are…
3. Do not send a single work email the entire time that you are on vacation – Once you leave the office for vacation, even one work email reply means that you are checking email.  Once that precedent is set, people will expect that you are online and monitoring work email and they will continue to loop you into things
4. If you absolutely cannot stop checking email, designate one point of contact – If you absolutely must check email (highly discouraged), do not reply to emails directly.  If you feel like your input on an email thread is necessary, establish one trusted contact who can be your proxy and send your response to that person. That person can then respond to the email thread with the response without betraying that the response came from you (and thus you were checking email…)
5. 2 weeks before you leave for vacation, put together some lists – lists of what you are going to do before you leave, what you are not going to be able to do (for your manager), who will cover for you and any hot issues (for manager and peers), and then a list of all open items (for your sanity and career).   The open items list is especially important because you can clear your head of work things and know that all of the things to follow-up on when you return is captured.
6. When you return from vacation, make it on a Wednesday night or Thursday night – then even if things are insane when you return to work, you only have two days of mayhem.  Plus, you have the weekend to get caught up on email if you choose
7. If you set an out of office message and block your calendar, set it for one day before you leave – start your out of office at midnight on the day prior to you leaving with the message of “Today is my last full day in the office before leaving for a two week vacation.   If you have anything urgent that needs to be handled within the next two weeks, please let me know today.”  Then right before you leave, change it to be in the spirit of “I am out of office and will not be checking email at all.”
   
8. If you set an out of office message and block your calendar, set it for one extra day after you return – then use that day to work from home and clear through the email that has piled up while you are gone.  Plus, people won’t try and schedule meetings with you at 9am on the day that you return.
9. On that extra “out of office day” spend it efficiently by working “offline” – Sleep in and get some breakfast while your email downloads.  Then set Outlook to offline while you reply to email.  Once your email inbox is in reasonable shape and you have replied to the majority of them, go back online and send all of your replies.   Otherwise you wont be able to get through your old emails because the replies will start flooding in.
10. Use the exercise of going through the email as a way to remove clutter from your inbox – use it as a way to pattern match things that are not important coming into your inbox.  For example: which aliases are you on that you can remove yourself from, what new rules can you create in Outlook, where are you seeing the same bad processes or behavior repeat themselves and you can fix it at the root cause, etc…