Any time you come back to work after a break it's easy to fall into the trap of jumping straight to the mountainous pile of stuff that's built up.

After your third cup of coffee with a few hundred unread messages still to go you feel you've never been away.

One of the best time management hacks I've ever used was to keep the first day after I came back from holiday clear of anything.

No phone calls, meetings, appointments, no deadlines, absolutely nothing at all that due the day after I got back from holiday. I even set my out of office email reply to say that I'd be back the day after I went back.

The idea was to make sure that I'd got some clear space to get a head start on the backlog of work that had piled up while I'd been away.

It works brilliantly and I'd highly recommend it.