As summer winds down and many of our coaching clients and research participants are returning from vacation, we’re seeing increased levels of return-to-work anxiety. As one client, “Leslie,” put it:
Stop Overworking After Vacation
Six ways to ease back into your routine.
September 07, 2023
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Summary.
After a vacation, it can be tempting to double down on work in an attempt to make up for “lost” time, or to try to hurry through the time it takes to get back up to speed. Other times, the urge to overwork stems from a well-meaning effort to relieve team members of the extra work they were covering for you, or a desire to demonstrate that even though you were away, your commitment remains high and you’re still valuable to the organization. Whatever the motivation behind post-vacation overwork, it can leave you boomeranging from one extreme to the other, which increases stress and actually undermines your efforts to catch up. So how can you retain all the benefits of work recovery and resist jumping right back into the grind? The authors offer several strategies.