Chances are if you asked anyone today if they were ready to come back to work, the answer would be no. And luckily for us, the universe was on our side because Slack had a major outage this morning. Additionally, a system that I use to do 85% of my work was also down. I used this extra time to grab myself a latte this morning before settling down into my work.

I also did something differently this year that I’ve never done before. After coming back from a 2 week vacation, I decided to give myself even more buffer time. I gave myself 0 meetings and 0 phone calls and instead marked my calendar for the day as “do not schedule.” This time was fully dedicated to getting through my inbox, organizing myself, and prioritizing what I needed to tackle first and who I needed to speak with. Any other year, I look forward to the first day of coming back and tackling everything. If the last year taught me anything though, it’s to embrace the slow. You don’t want to burn out too quickly after returning back to work and instead you want to settle for easing back into it.

So give yourself a break. You have the entire rest of the week, why not spread it out?