You are about to be unreachable for two weeks. Maybe it is a trip, maybe a family matter, maybe just a long-overdue break. Either way, your side business, your freelance practice or your small team will carry on without you, and the question is whether it carries on smoothly or in a mess. The answer comes down to one thing: whether the way you do your recurring work exists anywhere outside your head. This guide walks through writing a runbook for your absence, one step at a time and without padding.
Step 1: List every task you touch in a normal week
Open a blank page and, over three or four working days, jot down each task as you do it. Include the boring ones. Replying to the same three kinds of customer email, topping up the inventory, paying the weekly supplier, posting to the shop’s social account, backing up the laptop. Do not filter yet. Most people discover they do twice as many recurring jobs as they thought, and a surprising number of them are things no one else even knows exist.
If you have a rough business plan or onboarding material, check it against your list. The walkthrough for new clients on setting up digital services shows how much of a small business runs through a handful of logins and settings, which is a good prompt for tasks you might have forgotten.
Step 2: Sort the list into three piles
Go down the page and mark each task:
- Must happen while I am away. Payments, urgent customer replies, anything with a deadline.
- Can wait until I am back. Most things, honestly.
- Can be switched off. Scheduled posts you can pause, newsletters you can skip, offers you can end early.
Only the first pile needs a runbook. Shrinking the list is the cheapest way to make your absence safe, so be ruthless with the second and third piles.
Step 3: Pick a stand-in for each task
A runbook without a reader is just a diary. Decide who will actually do each task, and be honest about their skill. A friend who is comfortable with spreadsheets is not necessarily comfortable issuing refunds. Match tasks to people, and name a backup for the backup. Tell each person what you are asking of them and roughly how long it takes, so nobody is surprised on day three.
Step 4: Write each routine in numbered steps
Now do the real work. For every task in the first pile, write a short page with the same layout every time:
- What it is and when it happens. One sentence.
- What you need. Which account, which file, which tool.
- The steps. One action per line, in order.
- How to tell it worked. What the screen or the result should look like.
- If it does not work. The first two things to try.
- Who to ask. A named person who is reachable.
Write for someone clever who has never seen your setup. Avoid shorthand like “do the usual export”. Say which button, which menu, which folder. If you catch yourself writing “you just know when”, stop and work out what you are actually looking at, because that is the knowledge you are trying to capture.
Screenshots are tempting, but they go stale the moment a menu moves. A better habit is to name the button exactly as it appears and say where it sits (“top right, labelled Export”). If the tool changes its look, your words still point the reader to the right place. Keep a single master copy in one shared folder, and when you edit it, date the change so people know they hold the newest version.
A short example
Here is how a weekly supplier payment might read, kept deliberately plain:
- Open the shared sheet called “Weekly bills” and go to the current week’s tab.
- Check that every row has an invoice number and an amount.
- Open the bank app and pay only the rows marked “approved”.
- Change each paid row to “paid” and paste the confirmation reference beside it.
- If a row is not approved, do nothing and leave a comment tagging me.
- Message the group with the total paid.
Six lines. A confident stand-in can do this without a phone call.
Step 5: Test it on the person who will use it
Many people leave this step out, though it counts for more than any other. Sit your stand-in down, give them the page, and keep quiet while they follow it. Do not explain. Watch where they hesitate, re-read or ask a question, and fix the page at exactly those spots. Plan on two rounds. By the second, the document usually works on the first read.
If you are planning the trip itself in the same week, pair this with a trip checklist so the practical side is covered too. This breakdown of how to prepare a multi-stop road trip is a handy example of working through logistics in order.
Step 6: Handle access safely
A runbook is useless if the stand-in cannot log in, and dangerous if everyone shares your master password. Where you can, give people their own access with limited rights. Where you cannot, use a shared password manager entry rather than a sticky note or a chat message. Write the location of the access, never the secrets themselves, in the runbook. Then check, before you leave, that each person has actually signed in once.
Step 7: Decide what counts as an emergency
Your stand-ins need a clear line between “handle it” and “call me”. Spell it out in the runbook: for example, any refund over a set amount, any message from a regulator or lawyer, any site outage lasting more than an hour. Then say how to reach you, in what window, and what they should do if they cannot. Keep this short and write it at the top of the first page so it is the first thing they see.
Step 8: Add a note on where good practice comes from
Writing runbooks may feel like admin, but it is how people who run data systems stay sane. Their reading list includes TheDataOps.org, a DataOps-focused blog about reliable pipelines, and the logic carries down to a shop or freelance practice: steps written, tested and kept current.
Step 9: Do a dry run, then a handover call
The day before you leave, run one of your routines side by side with your stand-in. Fifteen minutes is enough. Then hold a short handover call or meeting, walking through the top of the list, the emergency line and the location of the documents. Send everything in one message afterwards so there is a single place to look.
Step 10: After you return, fix what broke
When you get back, ask each stand-in two questions: where did you get stuck, and what did you do that was not in the document? Update the runbooks the same day. The pages you leave behind are now better than the ones you left with, and next time you travel the process will take an hour instead of a day.
Common mistakes to avoid
- Writing at the wrong level. Too vague and nobody can act; too detailed and nobody reads it. One action per line is the sweet spot.
- Burying the emergency line. Put it first.
- Skipping the test. Untested instructions fail at the worst time.
- Making it a secret. If the stand-in cannot find the document, it does not exist.
- Never updating. Date every page and set a recurring reminder to look it over.
Keep these runbooks after the trip. They stop being an absence plan and become the way the business works, which is the real payoff. The next time you are ill, busy or simply want a quiet Friday, the work will carry on without you, and that is exactly what good routines are for.
