Back at the Day Job

I think there is a universal law that says the longer the vacation, the faster it goes by and the harder it is to go back to work. We were off for a total of 23 days–just over 3 weeks. Today we were back to work, and the kids were back at school.

When I am on vacation, I completely disconnect from the day job. No checking email, no thinking about projects. Nothing. I’ve gotten very good at this. So when I got back to the office this morning, I had over 900 emails awaiting my attention. I quickly whittled that down to 140 that I actually had to read, or at least skim. By the end of the day, I’d sent nearly 50 email messages, knocked a ton of items off my to-do list, and in general, felt like I had a good first day back.

My new work laptop had arrived, but was still being imaged. It’s a high-end beast, 16 GB of RAM, a large SSD, and I was looking forward to getting it it setup (often a multi-day process), but it probably won’t be ready until tomorrow or Wednesday.

It was also good to see my coworkers (those that I could see–many I work with are in L.A. area) although I spent a lot of time behind closed doors today, either in meetings, or working on things that have been waiting for me.

Overall, good to be back. Lots of work ahead this year, which seems to be the case every year. I remember in the year leading up to Y2K, the workload seemed to increase dramatically. “It’ll ease up after January 1, 2000,” we were told. But it’s only gone up every year since.

Can you believe it’s now Y2K + 15?