I’ve noticed a strong difference between taking time off as a Manager and taking time off as an Individual Contributor. Taking a week or two as an IC is easy, you book vacation time with plenty of notice and it’s approved. The date rolls round and you say your goodbyes and off you go. You come back and you chat in stand up about your adventures and get told about the progress that has been made on your project. You have an easy day getting back into things and a day or so later everything is back to normal. Simple.

As a Manager you scour the important calendars to make sure you wont be taking the same time off as all the other managers, you book your time and you start thinking about how all those plates are going to keep spinning while you aren’t there. If you’ve been empowering your Leads and creating awesome, high functioning, autonomous teams there shouldn’t be too many worries, they should be able to survive without you for a couple of weeks. So you work through your todo list prioritising the stuff that could blow up if ignored and finally the date sneaks up on you and you’re off. A healthy thing to do is turn off email and Slack, if your team truly needs your help they can call. Soon enough though it’s all over and back you go to work. And there is no nice build up any more, it’s straight into a few solid days of meetings as everyone tries to catch you up on the thousand things that have been happening and every little emergency and fire.

Which leads us to the purpose of this post, how is anyone in a management position meant to return to work without undoing all the good relaxation the time off did for them?

Planning

Sadly the best things to be doing to help with your return start before you even leave, so if you happen to be reading this while chilling on a beach it may already be too late to avoid the chaos. Identifying all your incoming streams of work is the first step. Where does work come from? I don’t mean the communication tools, I mean the people, the projects and the meetings.

• People – Who comes to you for answers and help? Who will be making decisions on your behalf?
• Projects – Which projects are hitting milestones or are currently suffering from some sort of problem?
• Meetings – Which meetings are you usually in that involve decision making either from you or that affects you?

This list will form the basis of your relaxed return. You should book the catch ups with the people identified and the projects for the days you return before you leave. Book in focus time too to go through minutes from the important meetings (or more catch ups if that meeting doesn’t have minutes). Plan how your first few days back will go.

The Return

The first thing to remember on your return is to ignore social niceties, at least for a little while. Follow the plan, don’t get sucked into problems that people start to throw at you because you have said “hi i’m back” in #general on slack, have your catch ups first.

You have two goals while trying to catch up. You are trying to find out What happened? and What is happening?

The what happened side of it is finding out what decisions were made that you would normally have known about or been consulted on, as well as how scheduled things like releases went. Collect these and understand that these are essentially a done deal, even if you disagree with a decision. Don’t do anything about any of it yet.

The next bit is to find out what is happening, where are the current fires. Now you’re back the flood gates will open and all the usual sort of requests will come to you with the addition of things that have hung around for a week. It’s important again to resist the urge to be reactionary and do anything until you have investigated all your previously identified streams of work.

Once you have collected all of these you will have a brand new Todo list that you can prioritise and act upon. Hopefully that list will be small with minor issues, but if not you at least haven’t acted upon the smallest one and postponed discovery of something major while you do.

How you prioritise makes a difference here too, aim for the big things first, many smaller issues will resolve themselves (be solved by your team) by the time you get to them while the big stuff will still be there if you go for the small first.

This plan will of course not avoid the additional work that awaits a returning manager but follow it and you can reduce it somewhat. And hopefully avoid the disorganised, relaxation ruining, panic and chaos that comes with it.