1. Ease in
You won't be used to a strong coffee first thing, or early morning socialising with people you don't care for. Above all, try not to achieve too much on your first day back at work; it's enough that you're there. Sit down at your desk with a weak tea and watch a couple of episodes of Homes Under the Hammer on your computer. Baby steps.
2. Make a clean break
Did you leave a lot of work unfinished before you left for Christmas? Chuck it all out. That's 2012 business. This is 2013. If there was any point to that work at all, you would have done it last month. Don't put it to your boss quite that way.
3. Celebrate 'bring your tree to work' day
Take your old Christmas tree into the office. Tell everyone you're taking it to the recycling centre in the afternoon. Surreptitiously decorate it during your tea break.
4. Make a fresh start
It's time to set aside all your old work-avoidance routines, and come up with some brand new ones. You need something you can continually check up on while you're supposed to be getting stuff done. Try putting a webcam on your cat.
5. Indulge your appetite
For the first week you'll get hungry at odd times, possibly as a result of spending two weeks sitting on the sofa eating cereal out of the box in front of World's Strongest Man. Don't wait for lunch – you won't make it. But don't skip lunch either; you'll probably fancy a cocktail about then.
6. Sabotage everyone else's new years' resolutions
Bring chocolate to work one day, champagne the next. Pretend it's your birthday if you have to.
7. Book your holiday now
In this dark winter of long hours for low pay, you need nothing so much as a sense of hope. Planning a summer break should go some way to fostering the hope that in six months' time you will still have a job to take a holiday from.
8. Re-develop the winter vomiting bug
Any time you spent being violently ill during the holidays should be clawed back off your employer now, while the norovirus is still topical.
9. Go to the nearest gym during your lunchbreak, chuck £50 into the lobby, and leave
You can do this every day for two weeks, and it's still cheaper than a membership.
10. Quit your stupid dead-end job
Don't wait until the end of the month, when all those bills fall due.
