How To Organise Yourself At Work When You've Just Returned From Leave
Coming back to work from a period of leave or holidays can be quite stressful, even if you were organised before you left.
You’re often returning to an overflowing inbox of new tasks and priorities, and there are usually lots of urgent things waiting for your attention as soon as you sit down.
If you find it a bit overwhelming getting back into work, this blog post will be helpful.
Here’s my 5 step process to help you organise yourself again when you get back from leave 👇🏻
Step 1 - Clear Out The Junk
If you haven’t been checking emails while on leave, in this first step you’ll want to do a quick sweep through of your inbox and delete any obvious junk that’s come in.
It’s a good idea to clear out the clutter first and get rid of anything you don’t need to read or worry about before you look at the rest of your inbox. Doing this will help you see what you’ve got to deal with.
(You can also click off any old reminders that are no longer relevant at this time.)
The important thing here is to not get too distracted by starting tasks straight away.
Step 2 - Establish Your Priorities
Now that you’ve removed the clutter, it’s time to do a proper read through of your emails and get up to date with where things are at.
In this step you want to be doing these 3 things:
Work out if there’s anything urgent and requires your immediate attention.
This then needs to be your highest priority for the day and you may need to get started on it right away (otherwise keep going with the below steps).Action the 2-min tasks and quick email replies which you can get off your plate right away.
Prepare your actionable task list that you need to be working on by writing down your to-do items or creating a digital action list.
Step 3 - Read & File Any Email Conversations You Need Be Across But Are Not Necessarily Required Take Action On
If you don’t need to do anything within an email chain but still need to stay up to date with how it’s progressing, you can either read these emails now or set aside some time later by creating an action item on your to-do list to read it then.
Step 4 - Check In With Your Team/Assistant
If you have work in a team or have an assistant, now’s a good time to check in with them and catch up on whatever’s been happening since you went on leave.
They may have further tasks for you to action, or you may need to delegate anything relevant.
Step 5 - Start Taking Action On Your Task List
Hopefully by now you’ve been able to get these steps done in a few hours and you’re back on top of things.
This means you can now get started on working through your task list!
And there you have it - a quick way to get back to being organised and in control after you’ve returned from holidays!
Valli x
