Vacations are an important part of your work year. Taking time away to relax, reflect, and recharge comes with several benefits. Yet there are times when your vacation ends but your motivation to dive back into work doesn’t follow. If you work remotely, it may be particularly difficult to get back into your routine, because you’re not around other people who have been working steadily while you were away.
There are many reasons why you might be having a hard time getting work done after your vacation. Before you can take steps to energize yourself, you need to understand a little more about why you’re having trouble getting started. Here are three common reasons why you’re slow to get back into the game — and what to do about them.
The Mountain Seems too High to Climb
Vacations take you out of the office, and that creates physical and mental distance from your work. As I’ve mentioned before, lots of research suggests that the more distant you are from something, the more abstractly you think about it.
When it comes to work, distance is a double-edged sword. It can help you think about your priorities (we’ll take that up in the next section), but it can also make the sheer volume of what you have to accomplish seem insurmountable. If you have a big project to complete, you may find it difficult to see how you’ll actually get it done. That sense that a project can’t be done is paralyzing, because studies demonstrate that your motivation to complete it is increased by both the importance of the work you’re doing and the likelihood that you’ll actually be able to complete it. In other words, if you don’t think you can get a particular task done, you’re unlikely to muster the energy to work on it.
That means you need to turn the abstract task into specific steps you can complete. Go back to your to-do list and dedicate specific times to addressing particular components of the bigger project. Get some advice from others who have succeeded on similar projects if you need some help determining the next steps you need to take. Also, reach out to colleagues whose help you’re going to need to find out when they can be available to do their part. Use their availability to help yourself set deadlines for completing particular aspects of the work.
