I am one of the lucky ones – I love my job.

I would choose to work in my job even if I didn’t need the very welcome paycheck each month.

But that doesn’t mean I escaped the sinking feeling in the car this morning as I headed into my first day in the office after a glorious two-week break enjoying the sun, family, afternoon naps and the luxury of having no idea what day it was.

As I drove to work, my stomach felt leaden as I dreaded going back to work.  I’m not really sure why.  There’s nothing I dislike about my job: I enjoy the work, I love my clients and my co-workers, have a great office environment.  But still, I would have turned the car around in a heartbeat.

So here I am, almost at the end of my first workday of the year, wondering what advice I would give to those facing the same dreaded return to work this week.

The best thing I did today was face my to-do list.  It had gotten just a little bit out of control by the end of last year, with several requests from clients that they wanted out the door before the Christmas shutdown, all invoicing needing to be entered into the system by year-end, an inbox that looked truly scary.

My to-do list had devolved into a number of sticky notes, emails to myself and random thoughts in my head, and my notebook along with my usually more organised task list.  As I faced up to my desk this morning, the feeling that I really couldn’t remember anything that I had to do this week (or this year?), along with the nagging feeling that there had been several tasks that I had put on the ‘leave until January’ basket (a close cousin of the ‘too hard basket’), meant that I felt quite overwhelmed, and not in control of anything this morning.

So I spent a good hour or two finding all my random to-do lists that I had kept in different formats over the last couple of weeks of December, combed through the last month of emails, and searched my memory banks and put it all into an orderly tasklist in my Outlook folder.

And suddenly, I felt much better.  The list was not nearly as long as I had expected – given that it seems nearly infinite when being held in the very unreliable space of my head, this is not all that surprising I suppose.

I then prioritised the list, putting several quick-win items at the top of the priority list.  These included cleaning out the last few weeks of emails (reducing my inbox by over 200 emails), emailing a couple of clients back on a couple of issues that didn’t get resolved before Christmas, cleaning up my desk, and catching up with those of the office team that have already returned to work.

So now that my desk is tidy, my to-do list is wrangled, my inbox is not looking quite so scary, and a couple of the niggling action items have been completed, I feel much more in control, and much better equipped to face tomorrow, when I will start on some of the more substantial tasks that I had earmarked for January.

So with a great deal of sympathy to all those returning to work this week, I wish you well, and hope you can find a way to make the return to work go smoothly…