The bad thing of travelling

The bad part about travelling is that when you come back you simply have the same amount of work as if you had been at work and didn’t do anything.
It looks like people don’t think that you’re away and that basically you CAN’T do the things you would do while at work, send you emails and requests as if you were at your computer/terminal and when you come back after your trip (a really pleasant work trip in my case) you have a BUNCH of emails of things to do.

Of course saying that you were away doesn’t solve the problem, people will simply sit there and wait for you to have done everything…

Is it just me that suffer from the multi-tasking, multi-window, multi-desktop “desease”? I can’t live without at least 4 desktops and I think at least 10 windows open, but the drawback is that sometimes I get lost in the windows and don’t complete things. When it’s like today, that I have a 100 things to do and 10 people trying to talk to me and tell me things, I often get lost in the windows I open (and leave open to remember I have that thing to do) and have difficulty to complete tasks.
It’s a great relief when I start completing some and so I can close some of the windows.

This is also somehow reflected in the chat windows. When you work with someone far away instant messaging is VERY useful, but if you don’t reply instantly people think something has happened. Don’t they know it’s not like the phone?
Sometimes I read the message, but I leave it in the background for later and when I reply I receive back replies such as “oh, I hadn’t seen you replying so I thought the message had been lost somewhere on the internet…”.
In my opinion one good thing about instant messaging is that the messages remain written and you can also read them a little bit later and the text will not change!

For Mac users I would like to suggest adiumX and growl. The cool thing is that you can read the message in the growl popup and decide if you should open the message and reply instantly or leave it for later. Really cool, but sometimes distracting, I have to admit.