Top 10 Hardest Things to do After a Vacation
The trouble with vacations is that they end. Once easy tasks become especially challenging after a vacation. Here are 10 of the hardest things to do after a vacation.
1. Checking your email. Especially your work email. As badly as you may want to select every email and mark it as ‘read’ you know you will end up missing that one email about a mandatory training session.
2. Stepping on a weighing scale. Somehow it is possible to gain weight after spending 8 hours a day walking. Also, it turns out that delicious foreign food is packed with more calories than a Big Mac combo meal washed down with a Haagen Dasz milkshake.
3. Looking at vacation pictures without ruining productivity. Looking at a picture of a hammock by the beach or the Eiffel Tower by sunset will invariably lead to looking up airfares and accommodation.
4. Preparing your own breakfast. Instead of coming downstairs to a lovely assortment of food or even a quaint foreign supermarket you somehow have to not just make your own breakfast, but get to work on time too.
5. Waking up to an alarm clock. Even if you do rely on alarm clocks on vacation, chances are you are less inclined to fling them across the room if you are waking up early for sunrise kayaking tour.
6. Examining your finances. All that money you saved has disappeared. Just like your vacation.
7. Eating sensibly. It’s hard to justify cocktails for breakfast and deep-fried avocado for dinner in your own hometown, but even harder to give those practices up.
8. Commuting through rush hour. Unlike your vacation where you became accustomed to personal space and/or moving traffic.
9. Staring at a computer screen for 9 hours in a row. At least you get money in exchange for this one.
10. Listening to friends talk about upcoming vacations. It’ll be at least another 6 months before you save enough vacation days to travel again.
good list, a real pinch of salt right to the open wound. The hardest thing for me after each vacation is to get back into the routine indeed. instead of ‘I do what I want and when I want’ it’s back to ‘Work work work’. no fun at all for a while
I should probably put writing blog posts in that list. Believe it or not I started writing that post 5 months ago after my last vacation.
I don’t even know when my next holiday will be but I feel sad already 😉
Pshaw you live in Berlin. Every day is a vacation.
Today was spent getting medical insurance and adding up all of my receipts and putting them into a spreadsheet – I just don’t write blog posts about that 😉 It’s all glamour really!
That reminds me. You will soon be seeing a post about the horrors of private medical insurance in Dubai. Perhaps one day one of us will do a guest post for the other chronicling the differences between our expat experiences!
Ha, I’m planning on making that my next post actually! Something people should know before they move to either place, clearly!
Here it is your employer’s responsibility. My last employer had way better insurance. Public healthcare makes so much more sense.
I have no employer! If you’re freelance you have to cover it yourself. The employer pays 50% here as far as I know – will have to research it a bit more before I write the post!
The early morning alarm wake-up is the biggie for me. Crawling out of my nice warm bed while it’s still dark never fails to be a challenge, especially after a nice, alarm clock free vacation.
Yup winter alarm clocks are the worst. Getting from bed to a hot shower without freezing is near impossible.
A very good list and I might add just one….not having the trip to look forward to, it’s like you have to reorganize your whole mind once that’s gone!
I couldn’t agree more!