My last post was almost a month and a half ago, which makes it obvious to me that once you take a break, it’s hard to get back in the groove. Unplugging isn’t easy, but going to work after vacation is less easy.
I stopped a bit early for a vacation I went on from September 15th to the 25th, but I’m just now starting to get the motivation back to write.
I slowed down a bit in the beginning of September anticipating my two weeks off, but I think it made it a bit harder to start going again. After vacationing my 3-year-old daughter, you tend to be more exhausted coming back than when you left. This happened to me.
When I first came back from the real vacation (a 10 day cruise) I still had a few days off. I needed that to recover so no work got done on any side projects I had worked on. I just needed to relax, so I did.
Following my real two days vacation, it was back to work at my day job. That took a bit of time to get back into also, let’s just say two weeks a is a bit of time 😉
During those first two weeks back at my day job I had also been slowly getting back into some of my side projects. Even the side projects I was working on are now moving slower, but so is everything. Writing on both my blogs has been slow going as you can see here.
I’ve looked at ways to kick-start my inspiration for my blogs but it’s not easy when your mind has been almost shut off for over a month.
Some things are harder to pick up inspiration for, one of those being my wife’s business. Neither my wife nor myself have the motivation to go full force again. Then again it’s hard to pick things back up when they’ve seemed to be a failure so far. I’ve tried to think about and do a self analysis on what did work and what didn’t work. Mostly I know it’s best to learn something from the experience and see failure as a win. I feel it was a win, but an exhausting win with not a lot of immediate payback. It’s not completely over yet though.
Start Slow
The one thing I learned from being off for this long is that you have to take things slow. Don’t try to rush back in at the speed you had left at, or in my case a few weeks before you left.
There’s no room for a super hero in any workplace because that just leads to rapid burn-out. Let others pick up the slack a bit but don’t let that go on too long.
I found that going back to work from a long vacation was one of the hardest life shifts to make.
Turn your mind off on vacation, you’ll appreciate that you did. Never once believe that you can flip that switch back on immediately though, you may just kill yourself.
Start slow, go at your own pace and be thoughtful about coming back from a vacation. That’s what I’ve done and I think it’s working out. I’ll slowly wind up again and be beyond what my earlier capacity had been.
Oh, and if you don’t get to your previous capacity right away after trying, don’t stop, keep trying. You’ll get there.
Regularity
Now that I’ve made it this far and have documented my slow trail back to reality, I’m going to have more motivation to keep up my posting at regular intervals.
My idea pad has sat nearly dormant for several months and it’s time to go over it and clear out the old ideas and turn the new/good ideas into a WordPress draft.
I’m looking forward to closing out the year with a bang as I did last year. I’m not sure I’ll be able to bypass last years ambition, but I sure may be able to meet it!
My takeaway is that humans are not really done for work 🙂 A couple of hours here and there on interesting topics wold be just fine to keep us challenged between long weeks of enjoying the sun, eating, wandering.
It seems you took a wisdom lesson at the occasion of the holidays. Welcome to the club! happened to me also. We tend to be super motivated and excited by everything we could do, but some choices and priorities apply otherwise relations suffer, creativity and eventually health.
Solution? I’ve been told repeatedly I should work smarter. I got the wizard badge, now I should find where I can buy the smart badge, they don’t sell that in my local grocery store. Maybe something to find collectively during a #PKMChat.
I think I could go for your type of weekend Bruno, and I think you’re right. Completely agree that humans aren’t really made for the type of work that most of us do now.
I don’t know if I took any wisdom away from my holiday. It may just be that I got a whole lot lazier, even my attempt at increasing my exercise has minimized. I guess it did make me slow down a bit and I’m still in that slow mode. That slow has also made me think about some things a bit more, a good thing I admit.
I have no badges so far lol. OK, maybe I have an efficiency badge, at least I try. I know I have a whole lot more to learn though, and a lot of new things to try and places to go. If I’m to reach my goal of traveling after my daughter is grown then I’ve got a long way to go lol.