I just had to compile my list of Best things to do when returning from 2 weeks California, San Francisco and San Jose – SES 2006

1. celebrate your returning with your girlfriend, wife, kids or husband – returning home has to be celebrated with your beloved onse
2. write down some pages with all the ideas you had on the trip home
3. collect all your receipts from your pockets ASAP, so you can do the travel expenses any time later when you feel like it
4. get out of jet lag – but make sure you get enough sleep
5. give yourself some diet days with delicious, healthy and top quality… the food you get in airplanes is all crap and sitting 10+ hours in plane will get the water in your body blow you up even more – I gained 5 pounds on my last 12 days USA trip thanks to that ( plus 4 business parties at night and the wonderful US junk food which only tops in quantity, not quality compared to the austrian food I'm used to)
6. turn up your pc + notebook connected to broadband and wait for all the programs with autoupdate… you could get a couple of them updated and might need a reboot afterwards
7. perform a synchronisation between your notebook and your server or main workstation. One easy way is to have all his work files, notes, etc. in a CVS repository… if you want to setup a CVS repository on your PC in 10 minutes, read my old tutorial
8. type in ALL the business cards into an Excel sheet, including contact name, mail, company name, and most important the topic you have been talking about and possibly where… you'll need that info soon
9. Upload all your new contacts to LinkedIn and OpenBC
10. Download all your mails received on your main workstation – if you have a couple of accounts this could take some hours – plan for that by still using your notebook's mail account to do urgent communication – make sure you scan thru all of the most important ones ASAP

AND most imporant: plan for all this work in advance – could take you 1-2 business days depending on how many contacts, mails, etc. you got