Maryn: Yep, I didn’t neglect e-mail while I was gone. Caught up on it pretty well on the last leg of my trip, when I returned from Spain and visited family in NJ for a few days. I’ve been pretty good over the last several months of keeping my inbox empty — which continues to be a relief!

Where I fell down was the post-trip “dump” — I have my photos thanks to my friend who was in Barcelona with me — all my photos were on her computer, since I couldn’t use mine at the time. But the paper, notes, etc. are all still chaos. That’s a problem. I can already feeling their relevance starting to decay. Eeek!

NeverTheSameRiver: I did promptly sort through the mail and pay bills. And I kept the housecleaning cursory. But what can I say — my husband was here alone while I was gone, so I had to do *something* about the accumulated chaos!

Judy: I’ve also learned that it’s a good idea not to schedule any meetings or phone calls the first day back from a trip. Maybe I learned that from you!

Thanks, all. I’ll keep working on my system.

- Amy Gahran

1. I try to return on a Saturday or early Sunday so I have the weekend to do things like wash clothes, unpack, and buy groceries

2. I have a virtual assistant who has full access to my Outlook information using Plaxo. If an appointment needs to be set up or resheduled, she can do it.

3. I take advantage of the WIFI at the airport to check and respond to email.

4. I can also use my Treo to check and respond to messages

5. Like Dave, I do major prioritizing on email and voice mail. Clients get first priority, then new business, business people I’m working with. I acknowledge that I’m probably going to file or delete most non-essential email.

6. I try not to schedule vacations before weeks that I know will be busy. In this case, it didn’t work. The end of the month is always kind of psycho so this week has been pretty tough

7. I don’t schedule any appointments my first day back. I keep the day open so I have time to get through everything.

Hope this is helpful.

On the housecleaning front, now is the time to hide the mess! You can catch up on laundry, or anything else that’s vital, but I would put off deep cleaning until your work load is more manageable.

Things I try to do:
- while traveling, don’t neglect email; winnow it down and organize it, maybe by creating some temporary ACTION folders. Knowing you have to come back to 1000s of unsorted messages will freeze your brain.
- Acknowledge the importance of catch-up time - it’s not an indulgence, it’s a cost of doing business. It takes me at least 1 full day to catch up for every week i have been gone.
- Do a quick scan of whatever’s on your home desk (bills, mail) and in your temporary ACTION folders to check for hidden emergencies, but move very quickly to dumping anything that is a product of the trip: upload soundfiles, annotate notebooks, sort through the paper you carried back, get the business/moo cards into your personal database (or at least annotated on the back with key details). The key issue here is to recognize that the stuff waiting for you (mail, email) is already in its final form and will not decay if subjected to a brief wait. But the stuff you brought with you is not in final form, it’s partly in notebooks and partly in your devices and partly in your head. If you don’t fish it out, make the connections between the various pieces and assemble it into something coherent as fast as possible, it will decay - you’ll lose important details. (NB: By final form, I don’t mean a written story or completed video piece; I mean instead a fully legible notebook, written record of mental impressions, etc.)
- Once that’s done, sort the remaining stuff by task type or project or whatever works for your organizational systems, and then accept that you’ll just have to power through. But don’t log a 15-hour day trying to master it all; travel is hard even when it’s fun, and working beyond your limits your first days back won’t help your recovery.
- Schedule a small reward at the end of your catch-up day(s) - dinner, movie, etc. Me, I like a cocktail.

Good luck with it all!