Coming back to work or school after an unusual break—whether it's just been three days or, lucky you, an entire summer—can be brutal. No more open-ended days. No more sleeping in. Here's how to avoid too much shock and ease back into productivity mode.


1. Start Your Day Right: Well-Rested and with a Good Breakfast

Whatever your habits were over the vacation, the first day back will be a lot less stressful if you've gotten a good night's sleep and have prepared everything you need the next morning so you're not rushing and can actually get something to eat. Worse comes to worst, you can make an egg in a mug in a minute, miso soup and eggs for a hangover remedy, or shake up some oatmeal in a jar.


Get some stretching and other exercise in if you can. It's time to wake up and get back in the game!

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(Even if it's too late and you're already back at work or school, start setting up your routine for consistent sleep, healthy breakfasts, and exercise over this week and for the rest of the year to get back into the swing of things. Maybe just upgrading your wakeup routine by programming your coffeemaker and setting a great song on your music alarm will get you moving.)


2. Get Started Early or Carve Out Some Alone Time

I always found it overwhelming to have tasks thrown at me the minute I walked in the door at work, especially so after a long break. If you empathize with this, try to get to work or campus a little early so you can get situated before you're bombarded by coworkers, managers, or classmates, and before you have to dive right in to your classes or that next meeting.


What to do when you get to work and you've got a long task list and debriefing waiting for you before you've even taken your coat off? Just ask the person if you can have a few minutes to put your stuff away and take that time to get settled.

For students, try to get the lay of the land before you head to your first class.


3. Plan Your Day and Week

If you've got a few precious extra minutes of your day to yourself, use it to get organized and prioritize your tasks. Choose the most essential things you need to do and put them on your list, and schedule less urgent ones throughout the week. If you can delegate tasks, all the better.


For school success, creating a study plan and routine at the start of the semester is crucial. Use a planner or online calendar like Google Calendar not just to schedule all your classes, but also carve out your study times and project due dates, referring to your course handouts.

This organizing part can get you back into the work or studying mindset and even get you excited for the rest of the week or year.


4. Start with Small Stuff You Can Check Off

If you're still feeling like you're only there in body, get a jump start by tackling just one small task. First have a list of tasks you want to accomplish for the day (see step 3), and make sure there's an easy (but still important) task on there at the top. Something as simple yet critical as following up with a contact on something discussed before the break works. There's nothing as invigorating as checking something off your list.


For students, your small tasks at the start of the year may be just to get oriented. Attend your first classes. Read the syllabi. Make sure you've got all the supplies and books you need (or make the notes and preparations to get them). You're off to a good start.

5. Tackle Email by Importance

If there's one thing that will kill your vacation mindset, it's looking at your email backlog, which can be overwhelming. Automatically deleting all email while on vacation is an extreme measure for this common problem, but there are many other ways to handle vacation emails.


To get out of catching-up mode, you'll want to make quick work of these emails. Set up filters for your email by sender and/or subjects to make sure you're not missing any important emails (Gmail's Priority Inbox filtering does a good job of identifying these for you). A quick scan of the remaining emails usually will be enough to help you delete the bulk email and then process the rest of the emails chronologically or by conversation or other sorting criteria. Just feeling like your emails are manageable and you've got a system for getting through them will make the transition back to work a lot easier.


6. Leaving Early and Other Tactics

Most schools start their semesters in the middle of the week to ease into the year, with shorter days in some cases. If you have flex time at work, taking a few afternoons off when you come back from vacation is a tactic we've noted before for getting back into work mode.


Getting back to organized may best be done by getting back into a routine and taking those simple single steps that will put you in the right mindset again.


How do you get your mind back in the game after a long break? We're all ears in the comments. Photo by Rick Hall.


You can follow or contact Melanie Pinola, the author of this post, on Twitter or Google+.