First day after vacation and you are greeted woth an abundance of new emails and messages as well as other things demanding your attention. And not to forget: catching up with your colleagues. Luckily most of my co-workers are still on vacation so that part wasn't that much after all.
Most of the messages can be ignored. It's just a chatter, notifications and things that have been already taken care of by others. The trouble is finding out the ones that are still relevant among those.
For Slack the task is a bit easier, most of the channels van be marked read unless there are mentions. I might miss some interesting conversation, but I can be sure I won't miss anything I need to act on. The remaining channels I was able to skim through relatively fast.
The nice feature of Slack is that you can set a reminder for a message. So instead of going through the stream of messages I was able to mark the messages I need to act on and just keep reading ahead. Afterwards I had a nice list of to-dos that I needed to compete.
With emails it was a bit different. I do have filters to put certain messages to different folders, so I didn't have to worry about every message that had appeared into my mailbox during the past four weeks. Regardless, it was still a lot of messages.
At the end of the day I didn't get much of anything besides sorting my messages done. Tomorrow it's time to start working on that to-do list and hope I will still have some quiet time left after those tasks to get some "quiet time" stuff done before the majority starts returning back from their vacations.