It takes an average of four hours to lose your holiday feeling. Four o'clock. And that includes a coffee break. Not because you suddenly feel homesick for your lounger, but because your mailbox decides to reproduce like rabbits as soon as you log in again.

You open your laptop and boom: 236 unread emails, half of which are “important” and the other half are newsletters that you had long wanted to unsubscribe from. Your work group app has 87 new messages, mainly about who has or has not watered the plants. And as if that weren't enough, your agenda is now fuller than an NS train at rush hour.

Welcome to September. The month in which everyone wakes up at the same time and decides: we're going to have a blast! Projects that have been in the refrigerator for months suddenly have to be finished yesterday. Meetings are springing up like mushrooms and your colleague who never says anything suddenly wants to organize a three-hour brainstorming session.

And you? You mainly try to refill your coffee mug without anyone noticing.

September is actually a kind of Monday, but stretched over thirty days. You know you have to believe it, but you act as if you can postpone it for a while. Just like the gym: you buy the subscription, but you are not there immediately.

The joke is: everyone acts as if this is normal. As if it is very logical that after six weeks of summer we all suddenly have to work at full speed. While secretly we would all rather lie in that easy chair for a while, with a book that we never finished because we fell asleep after page five.

My solution? Simple. Pretend it's still a holiday. No, you don't have to bring an inflatable flamingo to the office (although that would improve the atmosphere). But just eat ice cream for lunch. Put your phone on silent for an hour. Say “no” more often to that umpteenth meeting that only repeats what everyone already knew.

Because let's be honest: September is tough enough. And if you can't hold on to the holiday feeling, at least you can laugh about it a little.