Best Practices for Managing Email Threads Post-Holiday

How do you transition back to work from vacation? Every time I return from vacation my email is flooded and my calendar is packed. It can feel overwhelming. Good news is that I’ve been figuring out my strategy over the years and I no longer stress about the ‘re-entry’. Here’s my process: First I triage my inbox. Use tech to your advantage, focus on what matters and clear out the noise. 🎯 Prioritize. Use filters to group messages by sender, subject, or project and identify emails from leadership, key stakeholders, and team members first. 🎯 Delete unnecessary emails. Skip the backlog of newsletters and other ‘nice to read’ messages. Also skip any threads where decisions were made without you. Those updates will come through team and project meetings as you reconnect. 🎯 Two minute rule. My favorite. Any email with a quick response or action, I knock out. For more complex emails, I flag them for later and group them into calendar time blocks for follow-up. Now I do a calendar review. Get a quick and clear picture of the day and week ahead. I do this review before I leave on vacation to ensure the first days back are focused. I do it again the first day back (within the first hour), and make any required changes. 🎯 Critical meetings. Look for meetings that need preparation and prioritize them. At the same time look for meetings where agendas have not been shared, reprioritize. 🎯 Block time for catch ups. Treat this time as a meeting with yourself and protect it. Schedule blocks for email, catch up with your team, to review project updates, and handle urgent items. I schedule these blocks on my last day before vacation so I’m set up for success when I come back. 🎯 Say NO. Cancel or decline non-essential commitments. It’s okay to say no to meetings that aren’t a high priority, especially in the first few days back. Now I reassess my week and perhaps reprioritize. What needs immediate attention? Have deadlines changed? Any new goals? A crisis? Understand current state and time block for critical path items and high impact work. How do you manage work when you come back from vacation? Please share your tips in the comments so we can all drop the stress in returning to work post vacation.

Ever returned from a much-needed break only to be greeted by an inbox that resembles a game of Tetris—just when you think you’ve cleared one, five more drop in? That’s exactly what happened when I returned from a two-week mission trip in Guatemala. While the trip was incredible, the email avalanche that awaited me was anything but. As leaders and executives, taking time off is essential, but the transition back to work can feel overwhelming. Here are my top 5 strategies to keep your sanity and stay on top of things after time away: 1-Prioritize Ruthlessly Not every email or meeting is a fire. Spend the first hour back triaging what needs immediate attention, what can be delegated, and what can wait. Trust me, the world won't end if you don’t reply to that group thread about last month's team lunch. 2-Set Expectations Before You Leave Before you pack your bags, make sure your team knows what to handle and when to escalate issues. This creates a buffer and keeps your inbox from becoming a disaster zone. 3-Use the 'Vacation Debrief' Meeting Schedule a meeting with key stakeholders to get a quick download on what happened while you were away. This avoids the back-and-forth email chains and gets you up to speed faster. 4-Embrace the 'Two-Minute Rule' If an email will take less than two minutes to address, do it immediately. This clears the quick tasks out of the way and gives you mental space to tackle bigger issues. 5-Pace Yourself It’s tempting to try to tackle everything on your first day back, but pace yourself. Block off your calendar for deep work time and allow yourself a few days to fully catch up. Returning from Guatemala was a stark reminder of how easily work can pile up, but these strategies helped me regain control without losing my post-vacation zen. How do you handle the post-vacation chaos? If you have any tips or want to learn more about how I maintained some of my daily routines during the mission trip, click like, share your thoughts, or ask a question in the comments below. Let’s keep the conversation going! #healthcareonlinkedin #litrendingtopics #productivity

The post-holiday (email) blues You know the feeling.. you’ve just had a fantastic holiday and you’re back at the desk. Day 1 at work becomes 17 hours long. The backlog of emails is enormous. By day 2, you feel like you haven’t had a holiday at all. Familiar? I learned something a couple of years ago about email management that I’m going to share with you. It’s how you can avoid the ‘post-holiday email blues’. Disclaimer: this one won’t work for everyone, in every role. But it might give some of my readers who spend a lot of time at the laptop, some tips to better manage emails and priorities.... and to make that holiday feeling last a little longer. 1.    Once you return to the office, put any emails sent to you during your vacation days in a separate folder. You will get through them, not today, but in the next week or two. You see, anything sent to you one week, or two weeks ago has probably already been dealt with or is out of date.  Why spend valuable time here? 2.    Start responding to today’s emails first. They’re usually the most critical ones for now. 3.    Gradually, get through the emails sent to you during your vacation days in the coming days/ weeks. Prioritise them using 80/20 principle and focus on the important ones first. My guess is, once you get through a third to half of them, the rest are no longer important. You’ll wonder why in the past, you spent the first day back from your holiday going through all your out-of-date emails. And you’ll free up critical time for what matters most, now. FOMO? I am sure your colleagues will be keen to tell you virtually, at the coffee machine or over a cup of tea/ coffee, the most important and juicy things that happened in your absence. Emails of the past may be important for context but they’re likely not urgent today. And they’re definitely not worth giving you the post-holiday email blues. Have you tried this method before? My bet is, your stress levels and your post holiday self, will thank you for it. #personaldevelopment #coaching #mentoring #leadership #development #personaleffectiveness #continuousimprovement #efficiency #management #prioritymanagement #timemanagement #holidays #postholidayblues