Back from long leave? Here are 4 workplace hacks to keep you going
Resuming work after long leave can be straining.
What you need to know:
- I resumed work mid last week after one-month leave – a break that felt eternal when I was putting in my leave application.
- It had been a month of sleeping at whatever time I wanted (this applies to waking up too), spending my days in pyjamas and T-shirts, thinking about nothing.
I resumed work mid last week after one-month leave – a break that felt eternal when I was putting in my leave application.
I remember crafting my automatic reply email with so much glee: “I am currently out of office with limited access to emails…” Someone should have reminded me that leave huisha.
I know you are expecting a banger leave story… but I am not the most adventurous person in the world.
I spent most of my break watching movies and serials; re-reading some classics such as The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole by Sue Townsend and The African Child by Camara Laye; rediscovering the village and meeting some relatives; and, of course, catching up with my friends.
When I resumed work, I had not prepared myself for the fact that after a month of being away, I would need to do a mini-overhaul of my life! Picture this: It had been a month of sleeping at whatever time I wanted (this applies to waking up too), spending my days in pyjamas and T-shirts, thinking about nothing… eating sugarcane at odd hours and taking long, mostly aimless walks; then boom! It’s all over.
Two days before the end of my leave, I was adlibbing songs on Tiktok at 1am. My sleeping pattern was completely messed up!
The following day, I tried going to bed at 10pm and my brain was shocked, it didn’t even understand what I was trying to do!
On D-day, I must have slept at 3am, which is extremely late for me because I take the doctrine of sleeping for at least eight hours very seriously.
But I suppose the sleep I got throughout the leave really ‘came through’ during that first day at work because I arrived looking as fresh as a daisy!
The second thing I didn’t realise I would have to rethink was food! When you are home, everything is easy.
You open the fridge and make your fruit salad at 11am, you eat your breakfast with no rush… all your other meals are also taken on time and there is nothing competing with your plate of rice and chicken for attention.
On my first day back to work, I realised I had not eaten anything beyond a cup of hot water when it was 3pm.
It is not that I had so much work that I couldn’t eat; I was just struggling to acclimatise. It almost felt as if I had moved to a new time zone.
In the middle of a task, I remember randomly standing up to go to my kitchen to get a snack and then realising I was in the office, and not at home.
The third thing was many emails. I am a responsive person. If you send me an email or a message, I try to respond to it as soon as I can.
I am not one of those people whose inboxes have 91 unread emails because that would give me a real panic attack.
But yes, coming back from leave saw me staring at a threatening number of unread emails.
What did I do to avoid running up my blood pressure?
I did not turn on my email work app until Thursday (a day after I resumed from leave) when I deliberately blocked out time to carefully read through all the unread emails and respond to as many as I could.
It also proved to be a lesson on the differences between what is urgent and what is important.
Finally, this happened to be the first time I resumed work when I had a team.
My previous role was very collaborative, which means that while I worked very closely with people on some desks, they were not exactly ‘my’ team in that strict sense.
So, this time, I have a team, which means coming back from leave also means checking in with them – the ongoing tasks and projects.
Luckily for me, I have the best team in the world – extremely switched on.
However, I needed to communicate that I was spending the three days finalising a report from last quarter while they run the ongoing tasks, and we can have proper team check in, in the new week.
That worked and helped me prioritise in that sense. So, basically, you owe your team an update.
What are your back-to-work hacks after a long leave?
The writer is the Research & Impact Editor, NMG ([email protected]).
