Bring Your Vacation Home With You

My Post-Vacation Protocol

Returning from a calm, relaxing vacation and entering into a noisy, chaotic world is the worst kind of whiplash.

You know the feeling.

You go on vacation feeling like a hamster on a never-ending treadmill.

After about a week of being stir-crazy, you finally adjust to the slower pace and really begin enjoying yourself. Finally, you can breathe. The pace has slowed.

Of course, that’s about when your vacation ends and you return home, only to get dropped on a treadmill that’s going 100mph.

Whiplash.

Quick note

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My religious re-entry protocol

I drop the ball on lots of things, but a re-entry protocol is not one of them. If you’re not careful, the day after a vacation, you’ll wish you’d never gone, which I’m not interested in.

To prevent that, I have a strategy to maintain order and keep the chaos at bay. Well, it’s more to let the chaos in slowly, as opposed to having it crash in all at once.

Daily processing

For me, the process starts even before I return home.

Maybe it’s just me, but I basically only journal when I’m on vacation or traveling. Partly because I usually make awesome memories that I want to remember, but it also helps me process the trip as it happens.

I used to return home and take a few evenings to sit quietly and think about the trip. What I liked, what I want to remember for next time, etc. I’ve found it much more effective to do it as I go as well as review it when I get back. Often, I’ll read through my journal while eating ice cream to refresh my memory and stretch out the vacation vibes a bit more.

It eases the landing a bit.

Morning routine

I have an incredibly therapeutic morning routine, which you can read here. It centers me and grounds my day. Without this, I rush off and inevitably have a chaotic day, which usually exacerbates bad habits and distractions.

Needless to say, it’s an important part of my day.

Don’t tread on my morning routine.

All that aside, vacation or traveling can really mess up our daily structure. That’s why when I come back, I make sure to nail my routines as soon as possible. Routines are what hold your day together, and sometimes, they need to be coaxed back to life. This will mitigate the encroaching chaos.

This also helps to keep you on course. Like I said, sometimes our routines get weakened a bit, and the last thing we need is to jump back into our busy lives without the normal structure we rely on.

Pick your work up slowly

When some people go on vacation, their work follows them; for others, it piles up, and for some lucky ones, it does neither.

For the majority of us, it piles up, if not our job-related tasks, then household tasks and pesky little things to catch up on.

What does that mean?

It means when you get back, you’ll likely have a flood of emails, notifications, reminders, errands, and tasks to do in addition to everything else. This can be overwhelming, and often, we either let them slip, or in our overwhelmed state, we pick away at the easiest tasks instead of what’s most important.

I have a few different protocols for this. The first is to set aside some time to catch up on all the little things around the house I need to do. For the most part, I enjoy this and try to do it first. I leave my phone and putter around the house, doing this and that, because for me, it is a nice, calm way to reenter my living space. I don’t hurry with it, and since the tasks generally aren’t strenuous, I don’t mind doing them.

I try to do this right away if possible. Otherwise, when I don’t feel like working in a few days because I’m still adjusting to the pace of things, I’ll go occupy myself with some less important task. It’s helpful to knock them out right away and all at once if possible.

The next thing I do, which is the most important, is I strictly plan my day out. In fact, after my incredibly therapeutic morning routine, this is the first thing I do. I take plenty of time with it so as to identify the most important area is to spend my time.

Without this strict intentionality, I find myself bouncing between the numerous tasks that have built up while I was gone. Usually, I default to tasks that are easy and unimportant, hence this strict intentionality.

I wrote a whole newsletter on my personalized system for intentionality.

What I use and how I use it.

If you’re curious, you can read it here.