In a small team, every holiday is a reorganisation pretending to be a calendar entry. One person away means their decisions, their inbox, their clients, and their half-finished work all need somewhere to live — and when that placement is improvised the week before the flight, it lives in whoever answered the phone that day.
The full checklist lives on hive80-lab; here is the spine of it.
Why one holiday breaks the rota
Small teams run on informal memory. The person going away holds a map nobody wrote down: which client needs prodding, which invoice is disputed, which supplier goes quiet at month-end. The leave request is approved in five seconds; the coverage — the actual transfer of that map — is scheduled never.
A rota says Tom covers. A transfer says Tom owns these four decisions, has this sheet, can reach this person, and knows what may wait. The first fails in a week; the second survives a fortnight.
The five decisions (thirty minutes, fortnight before)
- What they own. Fifteen minutes with their calendar and task list: named clients, recurring tasks, approvals, in-flight projects. Anything unlisted now is a fire later.
- Who covers what. An owner per item, not "Tom covers." One person covering eight things covers none. A task with no sensible owner isn't a coverage problem — it's a signal the task should be paused or killed.
- What the clients see. The short note: who to contact, that nothing changes, the date normal service resumes. One email beats ten apologies.
- What can wait. Mark the work allowed to sit for a fortnight. A leave with no "allowed to wait" list becomes a leave that nothing survives.
- The one emergency line. One named person, one channel, genuine fires only. Not "call anyone, we'll figure it out."
The handover sheet (one page, five columns)
| Column | What goes in it |
|---|---|
| Item | the client/task/approval, in the owner's own words |
| Cover owner | one name, never two |
| State | where it actually stands: "invoice sent, client disputes line 4" |
| Next action + date | what the cover owner does and when it's due during the absence |
| Escalate to | the one person for surprises, plus the emergency line |
Fill it with the leaver, not about them — fifteen minutes side by side, reading their calendar row by row. Then test it: cover owners walk their rows and say what they'd do first. A hole found on the Tuesday before leave costs five minutes; the same hole found on the Friday after costs a client.
The boundary rules
- Channel cut-off. The leaver's inbox auto-replies naming the cover owner, not a promise to "reply when I can." Checking is answering, and answering is working.
- The emergency line is for emergencies. Money moving, a client walking, something broken that stops the business. Not questions. Not "quick one."
- The leaver writes, the covers decide. The sheet records judgement, not instructions for every case.
- Re-entry buffer. First day back: no client meetings, no decisions. Read the sheet's outcome column, re-own the items.
Worked example
A three-person accounting practice lost the same week twice. First leave: a rota name, no sheet. Two payrolls slid, a BAS query sat nine days unanswered, and the bookkeeper answered email from an airport — "just to clear the backlog."
Second time, the same leave went through the ritual: eleven items, one owner each, the disputed invoice carrying a state line and a dated next action, clients holding the standard note, one emergency line. In fourteen days the line rang once — a genuine payroll error, fixed in twenty minutes with the sheet in front of the cover. She came back to a page of outcomes instead of an inbox of archaeology.
Total cost of the ritual: thirty minutes plus one page. Total cost of the improvisation: the whole week, twice.
The four traps
- The name-on-a-rota — "Tom covers" without items, states, or next actions.
- The absentee stand-in — the leaver keeps answering "just this once." Once is daily.
- The everything-pause — pausing all their work trades a fortnight of coverage for a fortnight of backlog.
- The return-day ambush — scheduling the quarter's biggest pitch for day one back.
The full page — with the five-line client note and the re-entry buffer drill — is free, no signup: Annual Leave Coverage Checklist.
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